Observability & Monitoring Foundations
Logs, metrics, traces instrumentation. Golden signals dashboards, healthchecks, SLO drafts, and incident response runbooks.
Business Value
Reduces mean time to detection (MTTD) from 4 hours to 15 minutes and enables proactive issue resolution for 60% of incidents before user impact
DORA Impact
- Mean Time to Recover
- Change Failure Rate
Key Features
- Centralized Logging
- Application Metrics
- Health Check Endpoints
- Alerting Rules
- Service Level Objectives
- Observability Dashboards
Who
When
Foundation (0-90 days)
Capabilities in This Epic
Centralized Logging
>= 90% of services send structured logs to centralized platform (ELK, Loki, CloudWatch) with retention >= 30 days.
Application Metrics
>= 80% of services expose RED metrics (Rate, Errors, Duration) in Prometheus/StatsD format.
Health Check Endpoints
100% of services expose /health and /ready endpoints for liveness and readiness probes.
Alerting Rules
>= 80% of services have alerting for high error rate (>= 5% 5xx), high latency (p95 >= 1s), and down status.
Service Level Objectives
>= 60% of user-facing services have defined SLOs with >= 99% availability target and <= 500ms latency target.
Observability Dashboards
>= 80% of services have Grafana/Datadog dashboards showing RED metrics, resource usage, and business KPIs.
Implementation Journey
Prerequisites
Complete these before starting:
- Services deployed to at least one environment
- Log aggregation needs identified
- Metrics collection requirements defined
Typical Timeline
3.5 weeks
Effort Estimate
Breakdown by role:
Team Composition
Cross-functional team including: sre, platform, engineer
Applicable Environments
Success Metrics
Entry Criteria
Prerequisites to start implementing this epic:
Exit Criteria
Criteria defined at the Foundation milestone level:
DORA Metrics Impact
Resources
Implementation Kit
Step-by-step guide, templates, and tools for this epic
View Observability & Monitoring Foundations Implementation KitCommon Pitfalls
Mitigation: Consolidate related alerts. Set meaningful thresholds (not default). Route to appropriate teams. Review alert noise weekly.
Mitigation: Use JSON logging format. Include correlation IDs. Define standard fields (timestamp, level, service). Validate format in tests.
Mitigation: Create dashboards for key metrics. Set up regular review meetings. Link metrics to SLOs. Alert on SLO violations.
Next Steps
After Completing This Epic
Once you've met all exit criteria, consider these next steps:
- Review metrics to validate DORA improvements
- Document lessons learned and update team playbooks
- Share success stories with other teams
Continue To
The natural next epic in the roadmap sequence:
Continuous Planning & Compliance IntegrationAlternative Paths
Other epics that can be tackled in parallel: