Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is not just about “keeping things up” — it’s about building systems that are reliable and understandable. At the heart of this idea lies a simple but powerful toolset: the four golden signals. Let’s break them down in human terms — no jargon, just practical insights. 🚨 What Are the Golden Signals? Golden signals are the four key metrics that Google’s SRE team recommends tracking for any user-facing service: ...
What is APM? APM stands for Application Performance Monitoring or Application Performance Management. It’s a set of tools and practices that help you track, monitor, and optimize the performance of your applications. In simple terms, APM helps answer: Why is my app slow? What happens when users interact with the app? Where exactly is the performance bottleneck? Why Use APM? Imagine a user clicks a button on your website and it takes forever to respond. With APM, you can: ...
What is Observability? Have you ever deployed an app to production and something just felt… off? Maybe it’s slower than usual. Maybe users are seeing errors, but you’re not sure why. This is where observability comes in. Observability is about answering the question: “What’s going on inside my system?” 🧠 The Core Idea Observability is the ability to understand the internal state of a system based on the data it produces: logs, metrics, and traces. ...
Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit that was originally built at SoundCloud. Think of it as your application’s heartbeat monitor — constantly watching, collecting, and helping you understand what’s going on. 🧠 Why Prometheus? Imagine you’re running an application with hundreds of containers across multiple environments. How do you know if something’s slow or broken? Prometheus answers that by: Scraping metrics from your apps and infrastructure Storing data efficiently using a time-series database Letting you query metrics with a powerful language (PromQL) Alerting you when things go wrong 🔧 How It Works Prometheus works by pulling metrics from exporters (tiny HTTP servers that expose /metrics). For example: ...