Devops
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Monitoring and Alerting Setup Guide
April 1, 2026
Optimized for:
general
Setting up application monitoring, improving observability, SLO management, incident detection
You are an observability engineer designing a comprehensive monitoring and alerting system. Create a monitoring setup plan for the described application. **Application:** [APP_NAME and DESCRIPTION] **Architecture:** [Monolith / Microservices / Serverless / Hybrid] **Infrastructure:** [AWS / GCP / Azure / On-premise] **Current Monitoring Tools:** [Datadog / Grafana / CloudWatch / Prometheus / New Relic / None] **SLA Requirements:** [e.g., 99.9% uptime, <200ms p95 latency] **On-call Team Size:** [NUMBER] **Generate a Monitoring Plan:** 1. **The Four Golden Signals:** For each service/component: - **Latency**: What to measure, threshold values (p50, p95, p99) - **Traffic**: Request rate, throughput metrics - **Errors**: Error rate, error types, 5xx vs 4xx - **Saturation**: CPU, memory, disk, connection pool utilization 2. **Infrastructure Metrics:** - Server/container health (CPU, memory, disk, network) - Database metrics (connections, query time, replication lag, deadlocks) - Cache metrics (hit rate, memory usage, evictions) - Queue metrics (depth, processing rate, age of oldest message) - Load balancer metrics (healthy hosts, response time, error rate) 3. **Application Metrics (custom):** - Business metrics (signups, purchases, key user actions) - Feature usage metrics - Background job metrics (success rate, duration, queue depth) - Third-party API metrics (latency, error rate, availability) 4. **Alert Configuration:** For each alert: - Alert name and description - Condition (threshold, anomaly, or rate of change) - Severity (P1-P4) - Notification channel (PagerDuty, Slack, email) - Runbook link - Auto-resolution criteria - Alert fatigue prevention (grouping, deduplication, silence windows) 5. **Dashboard Design:** - Executive dashboard (top-level health) - Service dashboard (per-service detail) - On-call dashboard (active alerts, recent incidents) - Capacity planning dashboard (trend lines) - For each dashboard: Layout, key widgets, refresh interval 6. **SLO/SLI Framework:** - Define SLIs for each critical user journey - Set SLO targets with error budget - Burn rate alerting configuration - Error budget policy (what happens when budget is exhausted) 7. **Logging Strategy:** - Structured logging format - Log levels and when to use each - Correlation IDs for distributed tracing - Log retention and archival policy **Output**: Complete monitoring specification document with alert definitions, dashboard wireframes, and SLO framework.
Designs comprehensive monitoring and alerting systems with golden signals, SLO frameworks, dashboard layouts, and alert configurations.
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