Observability and Reliability Basics
A backend engineer's starting point for logs, metrics, traces, alerts, and incident-ready systems.
- Status
- evergreen
- Visibility
- public
- Category
- Reliability
- Difficulty
- intermediate
- Published
- Jun 28, 2026
- Updated
- Jun 28, 2026
What Observability Should Answer
- Is the system healthy?
- What changed?
- Which users, jobs, or dependencies are affected?
- Where is latency coming from?
- What should the responder try first?
Signals
- Logs: discrete events with context.
- Metrics: aggregate measurements over time.
- Traces: request paths across services.
- Errors: exceptions grouped by cause and release.
Useful Fields
- request ID
- user or account ID when safe
- job ID
- endpoint
- dependency name
- latency
- status code
- error class
- release version
Alerting Rule
Alert on user-impacting symptoms before internal noise. A good alert has a clear owner, impact statement, dashboard link, and first debugging step.
Source Links
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Backlinks
Observability and Reliability Checklist
A checklist for making backend services debuggable before they are painful.