DevOps1 min read
Observability and SLOs Backend Teams Actually Stick To
By Priyatham Rama Sai
We stopped measuring every micro-latency graph. User-journey SLIs — checkout success rate, webhook delivery — aligned on-call responses with customer pain instead of CPU charts during incidents.
SLI design
Pick signals customers feel. Synthetic checks validate paths, but SLO burn should reflect real traffic mix.
Error budgets
Budgets force product and engineering tradeoffs jointly. Zero policy without nuance freezes innovation; 100 percent availability goals are fantasy for most SaaS.
Tooling noise
Cardinality limits and sane defaults prevent cost blowups — observability bills can kill projects faster than downtime if unconstrained.