How do I build observability with OpenTelemetry, tracing and alerting?
Observability lets you ask new questions about a running system without shipping new code. Its three pillars are metrics, logs and traces.
Implementation
- Instrument once with OpenTelemetry — a vendor-neutral standard for traces, metrics and logs; export to your backend of choice
- Structured logs (JSON) with a correlation/request ID on every line; redact secrets and personal data
- Distributed tracing — follow one request across services to find the slow or failing hop
- RED and USE methods — Rate/Errors/Duration for services; Utilisation/Saturation/Errors for resources
- Alert on symptoms (SLO burn rate, user-facing errors), not every cause; every alert needs an owner and a runbook
- Dashboards per journey, plus cost, security and business metrics
- Cardinality and retention — avoid unbounded labels and unlimited log retention
Add client-side error tracking and real-user monitoring so front-end problems are visible too.