Monitoring and Alerting Setup

17 items · Technical · Hard difficulty · 2 hours

Set up reliable monitoring, alerts, and on-call processes for production systems.

• Define monitoring objectives and SLOs

  List critical services, SLO targets, and acceptable error/latency budgets.

• Inventory telemetry sources

  Document services, hosts, third-party deps, and available metrics/logs/traces.

• Configure metrics collection (Prometheus/CloudWatch)

  Set exporters, scrape jobs or CloudWatch metrics, labels, and retention policies.

• Instrument application code for metrics and tracing

  Add counters, histograms, meaningful labels, and OpenTelemetry spans where needed.

• Set up log aggregation (Loki/CloudWatch Logs)

  Centralize logs, enforce structured logging, and configure retention/indices.

• Configure distributed tracing backend

  Install collector (Tempo/Jaeger/OTel) and set sampling and span forwarding.

• Create dashboards for key SLOs and signals

  Build dashboards showing latency, error rate, throughput, and resource saturation.

• Implement uptime and synthetic monitoring

  Add external checks, heartbeat metrics, and synthetic tests for critical endpoints.

• Define alerting rules and thresholds

  Translate SLO violations into alert rules with aggregation windows and severity.

• Tune alert noise, deduplication, and silencing policies

  Add grouping, inhibition, and temporary silences to reduce alert fatigue.

• Integrate alerts with PagerDuty and Slack

  Create notification channels, escalation paths, and template payloads for alerts.

• Configure PagerDuty integration

  Create service, escalation policy, and routing key; restrict who can modify it.

• Configure Slack integration

  Set up channels, webhook or app, and message formatting for actionable alerts.

• Send test alerts and verify escalation

  Trigger test incidents to confirm delivery, escalation, and on-call handoffs.

• Attach runbook links and remediation steps to alerts

  Include concise runbook URLs, commands, and rollback steps in alert payloads.

• Set up on-call rotation and playbooks

  Define shifts, backups, escalation layers, and handover procedures.

• Run incident drills and validate postmortem process

  Conduct a fire drill, verify notifications, and practice writing postmortems.

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