Anti-patterns for strategic instrumentation

Excessive data collection: Over-instrumentation leads to unnecessary data collection, escalating costs, and storage requirements. Prioritize collecting relevant data that provides valuable insights into the customer experience while interacting with systems and your organization's desired business outcomes. For use cases needing verbose datasets, implement aggressive data retention policies. This approach balances the need for detailed, short-term data for efficient troubleshooting without excessive costs.

Lack of standardization: Inconsistency in Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and metric formats impedes understanding and interpretation of metrics. DevOps principles emphasize communication, collaboration, and visibility, which inconsistent standards undermine. Establish standardized guidelines for defining and formatting these metrics, and use a centralized observability platform for tracking and enforcing these standards, promoting continuous improvement.

Monitoring in isolation: Observing individual components in isolation decreases visibility into system interactions and dependencies, hindering root cause identification, adds delay to detection time, and can generate inaccurate alerts. Adopt a holistic observability approach through a centralized platform, taking into account the entire system and its interdependencies.

Reactive monitoring: Reactive monitoring, triggered by incidents or issues, can increase downtime and incur additional cost over time. Embrace a proactive, continuous monitoring stance that tracks system performance and user behaviors. Implement thresholds, alerts, predictive analytics, and constant data collection across all system components to detect and address issues before affecting the end user.

Misaligned SLOs: Service Level Objectives (SLOs) defined solely by business teams without the input from technical teams can result in unachievable targets, leading to frequent breaches of Service Level Agreements and missed KPIs. Defining SLOs should be a collaborative process involving both business and technical teams to align technical realities with business objectives and customer expectations.