How to use this reference
- Work through topics top to bottom — SLOs assume you understand metrics; distributed tracing assumes you understand correlation IDs from logging.
- Google SRE Book Ch. 6 (monitoring) and Ch. 4–5 (SLOs, alerting) are the anchor — each subtopic points to specific sections, not cover-to-cover reading.
- We deliberately do not repeat Networking packet capture, OS syscall I/O, or Distributed Systems circuit-breaker theory — only how to measure and alert on those behaviors.
- Optional tasks include local Prometheus/Grafana or OTel sandbox exercises — skip if you already use Datadog or similar daily at work.
The Reference
- 1
Logs, metrics, and traces — the three pillars, and why cardinality is the hidden cost center.
- 2
Structured events, pipelines, and search platforms — from stdout to Splunk, Quickwit, and Loki.
- 3
RED, USE, Prometheus, histograms, and the SLI math behind percentiles.
- 4
OpenTelemetry, context propagation, and sampling — following a request across twenty services.
- 5
SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and burn-rate alerting — the language of reliability engineering.
- 6
Alert design that pages humans only when necessary — and incident response that learns.
- 7
Datadog unified observability vs the Grafana LGTM stack — vendor and OSS trade-offs at scale.
- 8
Dashboards, exemplars, triage workflows, profiling, and eBPF — finding root cause under fire.