Observability Signals: Metrics, Logs, Traces and Profiles
A practical introduction to the four observability signals and how they work together to give you a complete picture of your system.
This page describes a typical starting point for teams building out their observability practice. The actual content is shaped around your stack, your signals, and what your team needs to get better at. No two sessions are the same.
What this training covers
A lot of teams have metrics. Some have logs. Fewer have traces. Almost nobody has profiles. And most teams aren’t sure how to connect them when something goes wrong.
This training covers all four signals and, more importantly, how they work together. You’ll leave with a clear mental model for what each signal is good at, where it falls short, and how to use them in combination to diagnose issues you couldn’t crack before.
Agenda
- The four signals and what they each tell you
- Metrics: what to measure, cardinality, and avoiding common pitfalls
- Logs: structured logging, querying with LogQL, and knowing when logs aren’t enough
- Traces: distributed tracing, spans, and finding where time is actually going
- Profiles: continuous profiling with Pyroscope and what it adds to the picture
- Correlating signals: putting it all together in a real incident scenario
Labs
- Instrument a sample service with OpenTelemetry to emit all four signals
- Use Grafana to correlate a latency spike across metrics, logs, and traces
- Identify a performance bottleneck using continuous profiling
Who this is for
Teams that are starting their observability journey and want to do it properly from the start. Teams that have some signals set up but struggle to connect them when debugging. Engineers who want to understand what’s actually happening inside their distributed systems.
This training is built around your situation
Before the session, I want to know where you are. Which signals do you already have? What’s your current stack? Where do you lose time when diagnosing incidents? The agenda above is a guide, not a fixed program. If your team needs to go deeper on traces or has a specific tool migration coming up, we make room for that.
Get in touch at info@obserfana.com to talk through what makes sense for your team.