Observability Architecture

This page explains how to think about monitoring, logging, alerting, and troubleshooting as part of system design.

Why It Matters

If a system fails and you cannot quickly understand why, the design is incomplete. Observability helps teams detect, investigate, and recover from issues faster.

Core Signals

• Metrics
• Logs
• Traces
• Alerts

Basic Design Approach

1. Define what healthy behavior looks like.
2. Collect metrics from applications and infrastructure.
3. Centralize logs with useful labels.
4. Set alerts for symptoms that matter to users.
5. Build dashboards for common investigations.

What to Monitor

• Availability
• Error rate
• Latency
• Resource usage
• Deployment health
• Dependency failures

Common Risks

• Too many noisy alerts
• Logs without structure or labels
• Dashboards that do not help during incidents
• No clear ownership for alerts

Practical Advice

• Alert on user impact, not every metric change
• Keep labels consistent
• Make logs and metrics easy to correlate
• Review alert quality regularly