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Prometheus + Grafana fundamentals: dashboards that engineers use

   If you’re setting up monitoring and want dashboards engineers actually use (not pretty charts that don’t help during incidents), this guide walks through Prometheus + Grafana fundamentals and focuses on building dashboards that are actionable for on-call, troubleshooting, and capacity planning: https://lnkd.in/eY9K4GFU The best dashboards follow a simple rule: start with questions engineers ask, then design panels that answer them fast. (Grafana’s own guidance and fundamentals align with this mindset.) ✅ What to include in engineer-grade dashboards Golden signals / RED: latency, traffic, errors, saturation Service health: availability, SLO burn, error-budget signals Infra & Kubernetes: CPU/memory, node pressure, pod restarts, throttling Dependencies: DB/cache/queue latency + error rates Alerts that matter: fewer, higher-signal alerts tied to impact ✅ Prometheus + Grafana done right Prometheus collects time-series metrics; Grafana visualizes them into dashboards and aler...
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Reduce MTTR: Playbooks, Runbooks, Alert Tuning, and Ownership (the engineer’s step-by-step guide)

  If you’re struggling with slow incident recovery, noisy alerts, or unclear “who owns what” during outages, this step-by-step guide explains how to  reduce MTTR  using practical engineering habits:  playbooks, runbooks, alert tuning, and clear ownership —so on-call becomes predictable and incidents close faster. MTTR drops when response is  systematic , not heroic: ✅  Playbooks  for fast triage (what to check first, common failure patterns) ✅  Runbooks  for repeatable fixes (commands, rollback steps, known-good actions) ✅  Alert tuning  to kill noise (actionable alerts only, correct thresholds, dedup) ✅  Ownership  so issues don’t bounce between teams (service owners + escalation paths) ✅  Post-incident improvements  that prevent repeats (automation + guardrails) Read the full guide here: https://www.cloudopsnow.in/reduce-mttr-playbooks-runbooks-alert-tuning-and-ownership-the-engineers-step-by-step-guide/ #SRE #...

Incident Management: On-Call, Severity, Comms Templates, and Postmortems (the practical playbook)

  If you’re running production systems,  incident response needs a playbook—not improvisation . This practical guide covers the end-to-end workflow:  on-call readiness, severity levels, clear stakeholder comms (with reusable templates), and blameless postmortems  so your team can reduce confusion, improve MTTR, and learn from every outage. ✅ What you’ll implement from this playbook: On-call structure:  roles, handoffs, escalation, and runbook habits Severity model:  SEV/P0 definitions tied to customer impact + response expectations Comms templates:  consistent updates for “Investigating → Identified → Monitoring → Resolved” Postmortems that improve reliability:  timeline, root cause, impact, and actionable follow-ups Read here: https://www.cloudopsnow.in/incident-management-on-call-severity-comms-templates-and-postmortems-the-practical-playbook/ #IncidentManagement #OnCall #SRE #DevOps #ReliabilityEngineering #Postmortem #RCA #Observability #Produ...

SLI / SLO / Error Budgets: Create SLOs that actually work (step-by-step, with real examples)

  If you’re struggling to turn “99.9% uptime” into something engineers can actually  run , this guide breaks down  SLI → SLO → Error Budgets  in a practical, step-by-step way—so you can choose the right user-focused metrics, set realistic targets, and use error budgets to balance reliability with feature velocity (the core approach promoted in Google’s SRE guidance). CloudOpsNow article: https://www.cloudopsnow.in/sli-slo-error-budgets-create-slos-that-actually-work-step-by-step-with-real-examples/ Quick takeaway (engineer-friendly): ✅ Pick  critical user journeys  → define SLIs that reflect user experience (latency, availability, correctness) ✅ Set  SLO targets + window  (e.g., 30 days) and compute the  error budget  (for 99.9%, that’s ~43 minutes in 30 days) ✅ Track  error budget burn  and use it to drive decisions: ship faster when you’re healthy, slow down and fix reliability when you’re burning too fast #SRE #SLO #SLI #Err...

OpenTelemetry practical guide: how to adopt without chaos

 If you’re planning to adopt  OpenTelemetry  and don’t want it to turn into a messy, “instrument-everything-and-pray” rollout, this practical guide breaks down a calm, step-by-step way to introduce OTel with the right standards, rollout strategy, and guardrails—so you get reliable traces/metrics/logs without chaos. OpenTelemetry adoption works best when you treat it like an engineering migration: ✅ Start with 1–2 critical services (not the whole platform) ✅ Standardize naming + attributes early (service.name, env, version, tenant) ✅ Use  OTel Collector  as the control plane (routing, sampling, processors, exporters) ✅ Decide what matters: golden signals, key spans, and cost-safe sampling ✅ Roll out in phases: baseline → dashboards → alerts → SLOs → continuous improvements ✅ Measure overhead + data volume so observability doesn’t become the new bill shock Read the full guide here: https://www.cloudopsnow.in/opentelemetry-practical-guide-how-to-adopt-without-chaos...

Observability 101: Logs vs Metrics vs Traces (and what to instrument first)

  If you’re building or running systems in production and wondering why incidents still feel “invisible,” this article is a clean, beginner-friendly  Observability 101  guide that explains  Logs vs Metrics vs Traces  in plain English—and, more importantly, tells you  what to instrument first  so you get the fastest debugging wins without boiling the ocean. Observability isn’t “add more dashboards.” It’s having the right signals when things break: ✅  Metrics  →  What’s wrong?  (latency, errors, saturation, throughput) ✅  Logs  →  What happened?  (events + context, structured logging) ✅  Traces  →  Where is it slow/broken?  (end-to-end request path across services) A solid order to start: Golden Signals / RED  metrics first Add  structured logs  with correlation IDs Instrument  distributed tracing  for critical flows Read the full guide here: https://www.cloudopsnow.in/o...

Multi-account / multi-project governance: guardrails that scale

 If you’re managing multiple AWS accounts / Azure subscriptions / GCP projects , governance can quickly turn into chaos—different standards, inconsistent security, surprise bills, and “who changed what?” confusion. This guide shares a practical, step-by-step way to build scalable guardrails so teams can move fast without breaking compliance, security, or cost controls. ✅ What you’ll implement (real, scalable guardrails): A clean org structure (accounts/projects grouped by env, team, workload) Standard baselines for IAM, networking, logging, and monitoring Policy-as-code guardrails (prevent risky configs before they land) Cost guardrails (budgets, quotas, tagging rules, anomaly checks) Automated onboarding (new account/project setup in minutes, not days) Day-2 operations : drift detection, exception handling, and audit readiness Read the full step-by-step guide here: https://www.cloudopsnow.in/multi-account-multi-project-governance-guardrails-that-scale-practical-step-by-step...