Best practices for a solid observability strategy

In this section, we will be covering some fundamentals of how to best represent your observability data while maintaining the right balance of information you need to process.

Build a hierarchy of dashboards

A key measure of success for your observability strategy is the Mean Time to Recover (MTTR). This defines how soon an engineer working on operational issues can understand and recover from the underlying problem. To begin with, it’s important to have dashboards that provide just the right amount of detail. Reducing unwanted noise is crucial in reducing the overall MTTR. A common problem software teams run into is creating a data-heavy dashboard that covers many different aspects of their application, all on one screen. This often leads to false negatives consuming a lot of investigation time.

As outlined at the beginning of this chapter, you must build your observability strategy while keeping your customer in mind...