Good observability is one of the highest-leverage investments for any engineering team. This checklist focuses on practical steps that improve signal quality, lower MTTR, and help you detect incidents before users are affected.
1. Start with service-level objectives (SLOs)
- Define availability and latency SLOs for critical services.
- Track error budgets per service and tie alerts to budget burn rates.
- Review SLOs every quarter to align with product and traffic changes.
2. Cover the three pillars
- Metrics: RED and USE dashboards for APIs, queues, and databases.
- Logs: Structured logs with correlation IDs and clear severity levels.
- Traces: Distributed tracing for cross-service latency and bottlenecks.
3. Improve alert quality
- Alert only on user-impacting symptoms, not every infrastructure fluctuation.
- Use multi-window, multi-burn-rate alerting for SLO violations.
- Every alert should include an owner, severity, and runbook link.
4. Incident readiness
- Maintain runbooks for high-frequency failure modes.
- Define escalation paths and on-call handover expectations.
- Write concise postmortems and prioritize fixes that reduce repeat incidents.
Quick win: if your team can only do one thing this week, add error budget burn-rate alerts and link each alert to a runbook.