Monitoring and Observability

Prometheus and Grafana Setup

Prometheus

• Core Concepts

  • Time-series database for metrics
  • Pull-based metrics collection
  • PromQL query language
  • Alerting rules and notifications

• Best Practices

  • Use appropriate metric types (Counter, Gauge, Histogram, Summary)
  • Label metrics with relevant dimensions
  • Use metric naming conventions
  • Implement relabeling for metric filtering
  • Use federation for multi-cluster setups

• Configuration

  • Configure scrape targets for services
  • Use service discovery for dynamic targets
  • Configure retention policies
  • Implement remote write for long-term storage
  • Use alert rules for proactive monitoring

• PromQL Examples

  # CPU usage rate
  rate(process_cpu_seconds_total[5m])
  
  # Request error rate
  rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[5m]) / rate(http_requests_total[5m])
  
  # P95 latency
  histogram_quantile(0.95, rate(http_request_duration_seconds_bucket[5m]))
  
  # Memory usage
  process_resident_memory_bytes / node_memory_MemTotal_bytes * 100
  

Grafana

• Core Concepts

  • Visualization and dashboard platform
  • Multiple data source support
  • Alerting and notifications
  • Plugin ecosystem

• Best Practices

  • Use folder organization for dashboards
  • Use dashboard variables for interactivity
  • Implement dashboard versioning
  • Use annotations for event marking
  • Share dashboards via JSON export

• Dashboard Design

  • Create role-specific dashboards (SRE, developer, business)
  • Use appropriate visualization types (graph, gauge, table, stat)
  • Implement drill-down capabilities
  • Use consistent color schemes
  • Include context and descriptions

• Alerting

  • Configure alert rules in Grafana
  • Use notification channels (email, Slack, PagerDuty)
  • Implement alert grouping and routing
  • Use alert templates for clear messages
  • Configure alert silencing and downtime

CloudWatch (AWS) Monitoring

Core Concepts

• Metrics: Time-series data points
• Dashboards: Visualizations of metrics
• Alarms: Threshold-based alerts
• Logs: Log data collection and analysis
• Events: Event-driven monitoring

Best Practices

• Metric Collection

  • Use custom metrics for application-specific data
  • Use metric filters for log-based metrics
  • Use metric dimensions for filtering
  • Implement metric aggregation
  • Use metric streams for real-time processing

• Dashboard Design

  • Create service-specific dashboards
  • Use widgets for different visualizations
  • Implement dashboard variables
  • Use cross-account dashboards
  • Share dashboards with teams

• Alarm Configuration

  • Use appropriate alarm thresholds
  • Implement alarm actions (SNS, Auto Scaling, EC2 actions)
  • Use composite alarms for complex conditions
  • Configure alarm states and transitions
  • Use alarm tags for organization

CloudWatch Logs

• Log Groups: Logical containers for logs
• Log Streams: Sequences of log events
• Metric Filters: Extract metrics from logs
• Subscription Filters: Stream logs to other services
• Insights: Query and analyze logs

CloudWatch Examples

// Alarm configuration
{
  "AlarmName": "HighCPUUsage",
  "MetricName": "CPUUtilization",
  "Namespace": "AWS/EC2",
  "Statistic": "Average",
  "Period": 300,
  "EvaluationPeriods": 2,
  "Threshold": 80,
  "ComparisonOperator": "GreaterThanThreshold"
}

// Metric filter
{
  "filterPattern": "[timestamp, request_id, status_code, latency]",
  "metricTransformations": [
    {
      "metricName": "RequestLatency",
      "metricNamespace": "Application",
      "metricValue": "$latency"
    }
  ]
}

Azure Monitor

Core Concepts

• Metrics: Time-series data
• Logs: Log data collection and analysis
• Alerts: Threshold-based alerts
• Dashboards: Visualizations
• Application Insights: Application monitoring

Best Practices

• Metric Collection

  • Use custom metrics for application data
  • Use metric dimensions for filtering
  • Implement metric aggregation
  • Use metric alerts for proactive monitoring
  • Configure metric collection rules

• Log Analytics

  • Use Kusto Query Language (KQL) for log queries
  • Create custom log tables
  • Implement log collection rules
  • Use log alerts for monitoring
  • Configure log retention policies

• Application Insights

  • Enable distributed tracing
  • Use custom telemetry
  • Implement dependency tracking
  • Configure performance counters
  • Use smart detection for anomalies

Azure Monitor Examples

// KQL query for error rate
requests
| where timestamp > ago(1h)
| summarize count() by success
| project error_rate = 100.0 * (count_ - count_success) / count_

// Query for slow requests
requests
| where timestamp > ago(1h)
| where duration > 1000
| summarize count() by name
| top 10 by count_

// Query for exceptions
exceptions
| where timestamp > ago(1h)
| summarize count() by type, problemId
| top 10 by count_

Stackdriver (GCP) Monitoring

Core Concepts

• Metrics: Time-series data
• Dashboards: Visualizations
• Alerting: Threshold-based alerts
• Logging: Log data collection
• Tracing: Distributed tracing

Best Practices

• Metric Collection

  • Use custom metrics for application data
  • Use metric labels for filtering
  • Implement metric aggregation
  • Use metric-based alerting policies
  • Configure metric descriptors

• Dashboard Design

  • Create service-specific dashboards
  • Use dashboard variables
  • Implement dashboard sharing
  • Use dashboard templates
  • Configure dashboard refresh intervals

• Logging

  • Use log sinks for log routing
  • Implement log-based metrics
  • Configure log exclusions
  • Use log alerts for monitoring
  • Configure log retention

Stackdriver Examples

# Alerting policy
displayName: "High Error Rate"
conditions:
  - displayName: "Error rate > 5%"
    conditionThreshold:
      filter: 'metric.type="custom.googleapis.com/error_rate"'
      comparison: COMPARISON_GT
      thresholdValue: 0.05
      duration: 300s
      aggregations:
        - alignmentPeriod: 60s
          perSeriesAligner: ALIGN_RATE

Logging and Log Aggregation

ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana)

• Elasticsearch: Search and analytics engine
• Logstash: Data processing pipeline
• Kibana: Visualization platform
• Beats: Data shippers

Best Practices

• Log Collection

  • Use centralized logging
  • Implement log shippers (Filebeat, Fluentd, Logstash)
  • Use log parsing and normalization
  • Configure log retention policies
  • Implement log archiving

• Log Analysis

  • Use index patterns for organization
  • Implement log queries and filters
  • Use saved searches for common queries
  • Create visualizations for log data
  • Use dashboards for log monitoring

• Log Security

  • Implement log encryption at rest
  • Use secure log transmission (TLS)
  • Implement log access controls
  • Configure log audit trails
  • Use log redaction for sensitive data

Loki

• Core Concepts

  • Lightweight log aggregation system
  • Label-based indexing
  • Grafana integration
  • PromQL-like query language (LogQL)

• Best Practices

  • Use appropriate log labels
  • Implement log retention policies
  • Use log streams for organization
  • Configure log scraping
  • Implement log alerting

Alerting Strategies and Incident Response

Alerting Best Practices

• Alert Design

  • Use meaningful alert names and descriptions
  • Include relevant context in alerts
  • Use appropriate severity levels
  • Configure alert thresholds carefully
  • Implement alert deduplication

• Alert Routing

  • Route alerts to appropriate teams
  • Use escalation policies
  • Configure on-call rotations
  • Implement alert grouping
  • Use notification channels (email, Slack, PagerDuty)

• Alert Quality

  • Reduce alert noise with proper filtering
  • Implement alert suppression
  • Use alert correlation
  • Configure alert cooldown periods
  • Implement alert auto-resolution

Incident Response

• Incident Lifecycle

  • Detection: Identify incident
  • Triage: Assess severity and impact
  • Response: Mitigate incident
  • Resolution: Restore service
  • Post-Mortem: Learn and improve

• Best Practices

  • Use incident severity levels
  • Implement incident communication
  • Use runbooks for common incidents
  • Conduct post-mortems
  • Implement follow-up actions

• Runbooks

  • Document common incident scenarios
  • Include step-by-step procedures
  • Include relevant commands and tools
  • Update runbooks based on incidents
  • Share runbooks with teams

SLO/SLI Definitions and Tracking

SLI (Service Level Indicator)

• Definition: Quantitative measure of service performance
• Common SLIs:
  • Availability: Percentage of time service is operational
  • Latency: Response time for requests
  • Error Rate: Percentage of failed requests
  • Throughput: Requests per second
  • Saturation: Resource utilization

SLO (Service Level Objective)

• Definition: Target value for SLI
• Best Practices:
  • Set realistic SLOs based on business requirements
  • Use SLOs to drive reliability improvements
  • Monitor SLOs continuously
  • Alert on SLO breaches
  • Use error budgets for balancing reliability and innovation

Error Budget

• Definition: Allowable amount of unreliability
• Calculation: Error Budget = 100% - SLO
• Best Practices:
  • Use error budget to guide release decisions
  • Freeze deployments when error budget is exhausted
  • Implement error budget alerts
  • Track error budget consumption
  • Use error budget for reliability planning

SLO/SLI Examples

# SLO configuration
slo_name: "API Availability"
sli_name: "api_availability"
slo_target: 0.999
slo_window: 30d
alert_threshold: 0.998

# SLI calculation
api_availability = 1 - (error_count / total_count)

# Error budget
error_budget = 1 - slo_target
error_budget_remaining = slo_target - current_availability

Monitoring SLOs

• Tools:

  • Prometheus and Grafana
  • CloudWatch SLOs
  • Azure Monitor SLOs
  • Stackdriver SLOs
  • SRE-specific tools (Sloth, sli-exporter)

• Best Practices:

  • Visualize SLOs in dashboards
  • Alert on SLO breaches
  • Track SLO trends over time
  • Compare SLOs across services
  • Use SLOs for capacity planning

Observability Best Practices

The Three Pillars of Observability

• Metrics: Quantitative data points
• Logs: Discrete events
• Traces: Request paths through distributed systems

Distributed Tracing

• Core Concepts

  • Trace: End-to-end request path
  • Span: Individual operation
  • Trace ID: Unique identifier for trace
  • Span ID: Unique identifier for span

• Best Practices

  • Use distributed tracing for microservices
  • Implement trace sampling
  • Use trace context propagation
  • Configure trace retention
  • Analyze traces for performance issues

• Tools

  • Jaeger
  • Zipkin
  • AWS X-Ray
  • Azure Application Insights
  • Google Cloud Trace

Observability Patterns

• RED Method: Rate, Errors, Duration
• USE Method: Utilization, Saturation, Errors
• Golden Signals: Latency, Traffic, Errors, Saturation
• Four Golden Signals: Latency, Traffic, Errors, Saturation, SLOs

Observability Maturity Model

• Level 1: Basic metrics and logging
• Level 2: Structured logging and metrics
• Level 3: Distributed tracing
• Level 4: Automated alerting and incident response
• Level 5: SLO-driven development and error budgets