Monitoring & Observability Checklist
Comprehensive checklist for implementing monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting across your infrastructure and applications.
Define SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs
CriticalImplement structured logging
CriticalInstrument applications with metrics
CriticalImplement distributed tracing
CriticalSet up centralized log aggregation
CriticalCreate monitoring dashboards
Configure meaningful alerts
CriticalMonitor infrastructure resources
Correlate logs, metrics, and traces
Implement anomaly detection
Set up synthetic monitoring
More checklists
Observability
Distributed Tracing with OpenTelemetry: From Instrumentation to Visualization
A practical checklist for adding OpenTelemetry tracing to your services, shipping spans through the Collector, and turning that data into something you can actually debug with.
90-150 minutes
SRE
SLOs, SLIs, and Error Budgets: A Practical Implementation Guide
A step-by-step checklist for defining service level objectives, picking the right service level indicators, and using error budgets to make better decisions about reliability vs. feature velocity.
45-90 minutes
DevOps
CI/CD Pipeline Setup Checklist
Step-by-step checklist for a production-ready CI/CD pipeline: source control, builds, tests, security scans, deploy gates, secrets, and rollback paths.
1-2 hours
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Monitoring and Alerting Strategy
How do you design a monitoring and alerting strategy? What metrics would you track and how do you avoid alert fatigue?
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Datadog Alternatives in 2026: 12 Tools, Their Real Prices, and What 300 GB of Logs Costs on Each
We read the pricing page of Datadog and 12 alternatives on the same day and priced one workload on each: 300 GB of logs a month. Datadog with standard indexing of every event is $780 to $1,155 a month; the alternatives we could price run from about $19 to $180. Here is each tool, who it suits, and the catch on its pricing page.
Distributed Tracing with OpenTelemetry: From Instrumentation to Visualization
A practical checklist for adding OpenTelemetry tracing to your services, shipping spans through the Collector, and turning that data into something you can actually debug with.
90-150 minutes