Observability, Monitoring & Alerting
You cannot fix what nobody can see.
Most teams have monitoring and still hear about outages from customers. We instrument the journeys that matter, agree what healthy looks like, and make alerts reach a person who can act rather than a channel everybody has muted.
Tools we work in
- Grafana
- Prometheus
- OpenTelemetry
- Sentry
- CloudWatch
- Datadog
- PagerDuty
Scope
What this covers
The specific work included when you engage us for this service.
- Health checks and synthetic monitoring on the journeys customers actually take
- Structured logs, metrics and traces that can be searched the same way every time
- Service objectives agreed with the business rather than invented by engineering alone
- Dashboards limited to the numbers that indicate whether the system is well
- Alert routing with escalation, quiet hours and an end to duplicate pages
- Post-incident reviews that produce a change rather than a document
What you receive
- 01Instrumentation in place for the critical paths, with the gaps named rather than hidden
- 02A dashboard set and alert configuration committed as code alongside the application
- 03An on-call runbook covering the top failure modes and the first diagnostic step for each
Questions
Observability, Monitoring & Alerting, answered
We already have alerts. They just get ignored.
That is the normal failure state, and it is usually caused by alerting on symptoms the team cannot act on. An alert should mean that a person is expected to do something in the next few minutes. Everything else belongs on a dashboard or in a weekly report. Reducing alert volume is usually the highest-value part of this work, and it is mostly deletion.
How much instrumentation is enough?
Enough to answer three questions quickly: is the system working, what changed, and where is the problem. If answering those requires reading logs across four services by hand, there is a gap. Full distributed tracing with every span sampled is rarely necessary for a small platform and adds cost, so we sample deliberately rather than by default.
Do we need to pay for a commercial platform?
Not always. Open source collectors with a hosted backend will cover most small and mid-sized systems for far less, and OpenTelemetry keeps you portable if you change your mind. Commercial platforms earn their cost when you have little time to operate the stack itself, which is a legitimate trade rather than a failure.
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Tell us where the manual work is
A 30-minute call. We map the process, tell you what we would automate or build first, and what it costs. No retainer before you agree the scope.
- No retainer before scope is agreed
- Written plan you can act on alone
- Worldwide delivery, on your hours