Distributed Systems
Jaeger Tracing for Cross-Service Debugging
Jaeger turns a slow request across many services into one visual trace. How distributed tracing works, what to instrument, and the sampling tradeoff that bites.
Guide · 7-part series
Observability for Distributed Systems
A connected series on production observability: distributed tracing to locate the slow service, and operator-first dashboards that answer one question fast when you are paged.
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- Engineering Strategy
Grafana Dashboards for Operators, Not Executives
Most Grafana dashboards are decoration. An operator dashboard answers one question fast during an incident. How to design dashboards that speed up debugging.
- Distributed Systems
Taming Prometheus Cardinality
High-cardinality labels are what kill Prometheus, not query volume. What causes a cardinality explosion, how to spot it, and the label rules that prevent it.
- Distributed Systems
OpenTelemetry Sampling Strategies
Tracing everything is too expensive; tracing 1% randomly drops the traces you need. OpenTelemetry sampling strategies, head vs tail, and how to choose.
- Engineering Strategy
SLOs and Error Budgets That Hold Up
An SLO you never enforce is a number on a wiki. How to set SLOs from user experience, turn them into an error budget, and actually act on the burn rate.
- Distributed Systems
Structured Logging at Scale
Plain-text logs are ungreppable at scale. Structured logging makes logs queryable, but volume and cost bite back. How to log structured, useful, and affordable.
- Engineering Strategy
Alerts That Don't Wake You at 3 AM
Most on-call pain is bad alerts, not bad systems. Alert on symptoms users feel, page only on what needs a human now, and kill the rest. The rules.
