Monitoring & Observability Strategy

Design end-to-end observability: metrics, logs, and traces. Applies the Four Golden Signals and RED/USE methods, stands up Prometheus/Grafana/Loki, instruments with OpenTelemetry, calculates SLOs and error budgets, and optimizes Datadog cost or migrates to an open-source stack.

This skill is a decision-tree-driven observability consultant. It helps you choose a monitoring strategy, define golden-signal dashboards and alerts, set SLOs and error budgets, instrument services with OpenTelemetry, set up distributed tracing, compare Datadog vs ELK vs CloudWatch, and cut observability cost without losing signal.

When to use

Use when designing a monitoring strategy from scratch, setting SLOs and alerts, instrumenting with OpenTelemetry, choosing between monitoring tools, or reducing observability spend.

Examples

Define SLOs

Set golden-signal SLOs

Help me define availability and latency SLOs with error budgets for a checkout API doing 500 req/s, plus the alerting rules to back them

Cut Datadog cost

Reduce observability spend

Our Datadog bill tripled — analyze likely cost drivers and propose a migration path to a Prometheus/Grafana/Loki stack