Observability Solutions
Unified monitoring, logging, and alerting stacks for proactive incident response.
Overview
An e-commerce platform had monitoring scattered across five different tools, none of which talked to each other. When an incident occurred, the team spent the first 30 minutes just figuring out which dashboard to look at — before they could even start diagnosing the actual problem.
The Challenge
Average time to detect a production incident was 14 minutes; time to identify root cause averaged another 50 minutes. Alert fatigue was severe — engineers had begun muting entire Slack channels because of constant low-value notifications.
Approach
- Consolidated metrics, logs, and traces into a unified stack — Prometheus + Grafana for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for distributed tracing
- Instrumented services with OpenTelemetry for consistent, vendor-neutral tracing across the full request path
- Defined SLOs for every customer-facing service and built error-budget burn-rate alerting — pages only fire when the budget is actually at risk
- Built APM dashboards correlating latency, error rate, and saturation (the 'four golden signals') per service, with drill-down to trace level
- Established an on-call rotation with runbooks linked directly from each alert, and a blameless post-mortem process
Technology Stack
Results — Before vs. After
Mean time to detect
Mean time to resolve
Low-value alerts/week
Incidents caught before customer impact
Outcome
Detection time dropped from 14 minutes to under 2. Alert volume fell by 85%, eliminating alert fatigue entirely. The team shifted from reactive firefighting to catching most issues before customers ever notice.
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