GoKawiilTeams usually associate the idea of infrastructure monitoring as a project to “hook up metrics” and “build dashboards”.
In fact, in almost every monitoring platform, dashboards are the first-class citizen. Teams often see them as the primary output of their work. It feels productive to see rows of glowing charts and telemetry. They make for some cool office art when you put them on a giant TV on the wall. But nobody spends their day watching graphs.
The real core of infrastructure monitoring isn’t dashboards. It’s the alerts.
While other platforms treat alerts as an afterthought, a checkbox you tick after the “real work” of visualization is done, we believe they are the entire point. Alerts are the backbone of your operations.
Start with the failure
When it’s time to set up alerts, most teams start with the metrics they already have. They look at a list of available data points and ask: “I have CPU usage for these servers. What should the threshold be? What’s a reasonable evaluation window?”
This is exactly how you end up with a noisy, untrustworthy system. To build a system you actually trust, you have to start from first principles.
Instead of looking at your metrics, look at your service. Ask yourself: what behavior actually indicates that this service is failing for a user? What behavior predicts that it is about to fail? Generally speaking, what metric behavior could indicate, or even better, predict a service failure?
Tip Simple Observability includes a catalogue of alert templates to jumpstart your configuration. While these aren't tailored to your specific environment, they serve as an excellent foundation for the iterative hardening process described below.
The boy who cried wolf stage
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