Operational Monitoring & Maintenance
Operations relies on continuous telemetry. The goal is fast detection and safe remediation.
Monitoring surface (what is measured)
Monitoring focuses on signals that predict user impact:
Request latency and error rates.
Service-level availability.
Dependency health (RPCs, external protocols).
Why these signals matter
Latency drives perceived reliability.
Error rates are a direct correctness signal.
Dependency health drives tail latency and incident frequency.
Observability principles (how signals stay usable)
Operational telemetry should be:
High-signal: minimal noise and actionable alerts.
Correlatable: consistent identifiers across services.
Non-sensitive: never leak secrets into metrics or logs.
Alert on user-visible symptoms first. Avoid alerting on internal churn that self-recovers.
Dependency monitoring (treat upstreams as unreliable)
Dependency health monitoring typically tracks:
Error rate by dependency and method.
Timeout rate and tail latency.
Retry pressure and circuit-breaker activity.
When a dependency degrades, the goal is containment:
Bound timeouts to cap tail latency.
Prefer cached or degraded responses when safe.
Surface consistent errors when serving is not safe.
Maintenance and change management
Maintenance is incremental by design. This reduces disruptive changes and lowers rollback cost.
Common maintenance categories:
Upgrades and patching.
Dependency changes.
Performance optimizations.
Change safety checklist
Use a lightweight pre-flight checklist:
Confirm backward compatibility on public interfaces.
Identify blast radius and rollback path.
Validate dependency and capacity assumptions.
Ensure telemetry and dashboards exist for the change.
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