Stage 2 · Lesson 1 of 6
Golden signals, RED and USE
You cannot graph everything, so start from proven checklists. The from Google's SRE book are latency, traffic, errors and . RED (rate, errors, duration) applies them to request-driven services.
USE (utilisation, saturation, errors) applies to resources underneath, such as CPU, disks, connection pools and queues. Together they give every service the same first dashboard, so anyone on call knows where to look. Track latency as , such as p50 and p99, not averages, and separate the latency of successful requests from failed ones.
Common trapbuilding dashboards with forty panels of infrastructure metrics, where the one graph that shows users are suffering is hard to find.
A question to check yourself, an AI practice session and 2 cheat sheet entries come with the full roadmap. Unlock
Resources for this stage
Start with· follow one of these
- GuideFreePrometheus Documentation
Prometheus · Intermediate
Free: the first steps guide, then the querying basics, functions and histograms pages
- CoursePaidPrometheus Certified Associate (PCA) Prep Course
KodeKloud · Intermediate · Subscription
Paid, hands-on labs for PromQL, recording rules, Alertmanager and Kubernetes monitoring
Practise
Keep handy
Also worth your time
The chapter that defines the four golden signals and what makes monitoring worth paging on