Monitoring and Incident

Key takeaways

• Observability stacks six layers: logs (what happened), metrics (how much/fast), traces (where), alerts (what needs attention now), dashboards (current health), and runbooks (what to do next).
• Incident flow runs detect, triage, contain, resolve, communicate, postmortem, and prevent.
• A runbook captures symptom, scope, checks, mitigation (rollback, flag, rate limit, workaround), escalation, and follow-up.
• Postmortems focus on system improvement over individual blame, recording timeline, impact, root causes, and concrete owned follow-up tasks.
• Both monitoring and incident response need ownership and rehearsal before production pressure arrives.

Monitoring tells the team whether the system is healthy. Incident practice tells the team what to do when it is not. Both need ownership and rehearsal before production pressure arrives.

Observability Layers

Incident Flow

Runbook Template

Postmortem Rules

• Focus on system improvement, not individual blame.
• Record timeline, impact, root causes, and contributing factors.
• Create concrete follow-up tasks with owners.
• Update runbooks and alerts when detection was weak.
• Review whether deployment or review gates should change.