Observability Best Practices

What this best practices guide is

A practical guide to observability best practices for teams running services in production. It covers choosing what to measure with SLIs and SLOs, designing metrics that stay cheap, writing logs you can search and join to traces, instrumenting with OpenTelemetry, running a telemetry pipeline, and alerting on user pain instead of noise.

It has 6 chapters and 23 practices, each with why it matters, what to do and what to avoid. For backend developers and SREs.

Chapter by chapter

1. Deciding what to measure (4 practices)

Start from what users experience. These practices turn that into a small set of indicators and objectives that every other signal supports.

2. Metrics that stay useful and affordable (4 practices)

How to name, type and label metrics so queries are obvious and the time series count does not explode.

3. Logs you can search and join (4 practices)

How to write logs that machines can filter, that connect to the trace of the same request, and that do not leak secrets or cost a fortune.

4. Distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry (4 practices)

How to instrument services so a single request can be followed end to end, using OpenTelemetry, its semantic conventions and sensible sampling.

5. The telemetry pipeline (3 practices)

How telemetry gets from your services to a backend: the OpenTelemetry Collector, resource attributes and protecting the pipeline itself.

6. Alerting that people trust (4 practices)

How to page only for real user impact, using SLO burn rates, and make every page something a human can act on.

How it works on Sefism

The guide reads like a short course: a syllabus, then one chapter per page in a focused reader, with a quiz at the end of each chapter for members. The opening chapters are open to everyone. Adding it to your account uses credits, opens every chapter and keeps your progress.

Every claim is checked against the sources listed on the page (8 cited).