Observability

What are SLO, SLA, and SLI? If you’ve ever dived into SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) or service monitoring, you’ve likely seen three mysterious abbreviations: SLO, SLA, and SLI. They might look similar, but they play different roles in how we measure and guarantee reliability. SLI — Service Level Indicator This is a metric that tells you how your service is doing. Examples: Latency (e.g., “response time of API requests”) Availability (e.g., “percentage of successful requests”) Error rate (e.g., “number of 5xx responses”) 👉 Think of SLI as a thermometer — it measures the state of your system. ...

What is a Percentile in Observability? When we talk about observability, especially metrics like latency, we often hear terms such as p50, p95, or p99. These are percentiles. They give us a way to understand not just the average behavior of a system, but how it performs for the majority (or the unlucky few) of requests. Simple Definition A percentile tells you the value below which a given percentage of measurements fall. ...

Introduction OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework for cloud-native software, providing a set of APIs, libraries, agents, and instrumentation to collect metrics, logs, and traces. It’s a powerful tool for gaining insight into distributed systems and performance bottlenecks. In this article, we’ll walk through what OpenTelemetry is, why you should use it, and how to set it up step-by-step. Why OpenTelemetry? Unified Observability: One standard for logs, metrics, and traces. Vendor-Neutral: Export data to systems like Prometheus, Jaeger, or commercial APMs. Extensible: Support for multiple languages and platforms. Step-by-Step Guide Step 1: Install the Collector Use the OpenTelemetry Collector to receive, process, and export telemetry data. ...

Introduction Jaeger is an open-source end-to-end distributed tracing tool originally developed by Uber Technologies. It is used for monitoring and troubleshooting microservices-based distributed systems. This guide provides a clear overview of how to install and use Jaeger in Kubernetes with practical examples. Why Use Jaeger? Visualize service dependencies and latencies Troubleshoot performance bottlenecks Monitor request paths across microservices Support for OpenTelemetry Prerequisites A running Kubernetes cluster (e.g., Minikube, k3s, GKE, etc.) kubectl configured Helm installed 1. Install Jaeger with Helm helm repo add jaegertracing https://jaegertracing.github.io/helm-charts helm repo update helm install jaeger jaegertracing/jaeger --set query.basePath=/jaeger --set ingress.enabled=true --set ingress.hosts="{jaeger.yourdomain.com}" To expose Jaeger locally: ...

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) may sound like a fancy job title, but it’s actually one of the most practical and important roles in modern infrastructure and software teams. What is an SRE? SRE stands for Site Reliability Engineer. In simple terms, an SRE ensures that systems are reliable, scalable, and efficient. The concept was born at Google, where software engineers were tasked with running production systems using software engineering principles. ...