Monitoring Essential Metrics for Cloud Native Systems - Part 1

Monitoring is not a dashboard only problem In the last couple of years, I have moved across a few product teams. Every time I walk into an engineering team and ask how monitoring works. I get a standard response. There is a dashboard Usually, Grafana. Sometimes Kibana or Splunk. Team members have passed me links buried in wiki pages and nobody updates them anymore. But dashboards don't make a system observable. I have worked on large scale cloud projects. All of them have dashboards but still struggle to answer basic questions during an incident. What can fail? The answer to this question can change how you think about monitoring. To me, monitoring is a system thinking problem. Any cloud solution that I work on is not a single application anymore. With cloud solutions, I am talking about API Gateways, event streams, microservices, containers, managed cloud services, and external integrations. Something is always lagging somewhere, and all users are going to tell you is "The system is s