Observability on Sam's Space

Observability Concepts

Sun, 17 May 2026 10:57:35 +1000

Terminology and Concepts

Acronyms and References

MELT - Metrics, Events, Logs, Traces
USE Method - Utilisation, Saturation, Errors
RED Method - Rate, Errors, Duration
“Golden Signals” - Latency, Errors, Traffic, Saturation
“Core Web Vitals” - Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, Cumulative Layout Shift
Apdex - A relative score between 0 and 1 that provides an indicator of user satisfaction with a service
Apdex-T - The threshold at which a user moves from a ‘good’ experience to one they ’tolerate’

VM Monitoring

Sun, 17 May 2026 10:16:55 +1000

Monitoring Virtual Machines

How VM monitoring is different

What you measure and how you measure it varies based on where you are measuring from. Monitoring an application will have different metrics compared to monitoring at the middleware, OS, or infrastructure layer. In this instance I am referring to monitoring the VM and associated OS from within the machine itself, where you are using these metrics as indicators regarding service health. Monitoring the VM from outside to VM at an infrastructure level, such as with vSphere will have a similar set of measures but non-identical. Best practice would be to include these measures as additional evidence when troubleshooting, but should be viewed secondarily to application-level telemetry in almost all cases.

Alerts and Dashboards

Sun, 17 May 2026 10:10:55 +1000

Alerting vs Reporting vs Dashboarding

One of the common concepts that is discussed in observability (at least by the author) is the distinction of what should be an alert compared to what should be a report. Somewhere in the middle of these two extremes is what should be a dashboard. Some of these concepts will exist across a spectrum between two points, but in most cases bucketing information into alerts, reports and dashboards will provide enough clarity that a choice to draw a line can be made.