Observability & Monitoring Platform
- 60% lower MTTD
- Unified SLIs
- Prometheus + Grafana
Problem: Incidents took hours to diagnose due to fragmented monitoring.
Solution: Implemented service-level observability with Prometheus and Grafana, unified SLI tracking.
Impact: MTTD reduced by 60%, on-call burden decreased significantly.
Overview
Service-level golden signals and dashboards that match how engineers actually triage—not vanity charts.
Before / after
Incident triage
Before: Hours to find signal
After: Faster correlation with SLI-focused views
Decisions
Key trade-offs and design calls that shaped the final delivery.
Prometheus + Grafana over CloudWatch alone
Context: CloudWatch dashboards were limited and expensive for custom metrics
Decision: Self-managed observability stack with better visualization and lower cost for high-cardinality metrics
Tiered alerting
Context: Alert fatigue from non-critical notifications going to same channel as incidents
Decision: Route standard alerts to Teams/Slack, critical alerts to Email—context-aware routing reduces noise
Architecture
The primary system boundaries, runtime pieces, and how the project was structured in production.
Prometheus
Metrics Collection
Scrapes service metrics, golden signals, and deployment health indicators from applications and infrastructure.
Grafana Dashboards
Visualization
Service-level views tied to SLOs—latency, traffic, errors, saturation—for faster triage and diagnosis.
CloudWatch Logs
Log Aggregation
Centralized logging for AWS services and application logs—correlates with metrics for root cause analysis.
Alertmanager
Alert Routing
Multi-channel alerts: Teams/Slack for standard alerts, Email for critical—routes based on severity with context.
Mermaid source. Paste into mermaid.live to visualize the diagram.
flowchart TB SRV[Services] --> PROM[Prometheus] PROM --> GRAF[Grafana] PROM --> AM[Alertmanager] AM --> ON[On-call]
Pipeline
How changes moved from development through validation and deployment.
Collect
PrometheusMetric scraping from services and infrastructure into time-series database
Store
Prometheus TSDBTime-series data storage with retention policies for historical analysis
Visualize
GrafanaDashboards and exploration for latency, traffic, errors, saturation metrics
Alert
AlertmanagerMulti-channel routing based on severity—Teams/Slack for standard, Email for critical
Incidents
Operational failures, rehearsals, or recovery moments that changed how the system was run.
Prometheus scrape targets flapping
P3Resolution: Increased scrape timeout and implemented service discovery health checks
Lesson: Default timeouts don't work for all services—tune scrape intervals per target
Grafana dashboard permissions too broad
P2Resolution: Implemented role-based access control with team-specific folder permissions
Lesson: Dashboard access should follow least privilege—not everyone needs edit access
Alertmanager routing misconfiguration
P2Resolution: Fixed routing tree configuration to ensure critical alerts reach email while standard alerts go to Slack
Lesson: Test alert routing with simulated alerts—misconfigurations silence critical notifications