Building a Production Observability Stack on Kubernetes
· 12 min
kubernetesobservabilitySREmonitoring
Why Observability Matters
You can't run production systems without observability. It's not a nice-to-have — it's the difference between finding an issue in 5 minutes versus 5 hours.
The Three Pillars
·Metrics — Prometheus + Grafana for time-series data
·Logs — Loki for log aggregation without the cost of Elasticsearch
·Traces — OpenTelemetry + Jaeger for distributed tracing
Putting It Together
The key insight is that these three signals need to be correlated. When you see a spike in error rate metrics, you need to jump to the relevant logs, then drill into the specific trace that failed.
Alerting That Doesn't Suck
Alert fatigue is real. The solution: alert on symptoms (error rate, latency), not causes. Use SLOs to define what "healthy" means, and only page when you're burning error budget too fast.