Three signals we allow in the monitoring week
Golden signals are a starting point, not a shopping list. Here is how we keep labs honest.
Participants arrive with stacks of dashboards inherited from well-meaning interns and contractors. We do not rip them out on day one; we ask which three signals actually changed a rollback decision in the last quarter.
Latency, traffic, and errors win often, but saturation sneaks in for teams juggling small nodes. We sketch how each signal maps to kube-state metrics without pasting vendor marketing copy. Then we delete charts together until the Grafana home row feels almost empty—on purpose.
The homework is a short note to application peers explaining what you will page on next month. If the note names more than three thresholds, we ask you to sleep on it. Monitoring should feel like a focused conversation, not wallpaper.