DevOps Engineer interview question · Most asked
How do you approach observability as a DevOps engineer?
Summary
Make it part of the platform: standard instrumentation (OpenTelemetry) in service templates, structured logs with trace IDs, golden-signal dashboards and SLO-based alerts per service created by default, central log, metric and trace storage with retention policies, and runbooks linked from alerts.
Longer Answer
Also manage its cost and quality: control metric cardinality and log volume (sampling, retention tiers), avoid alert fatigue by alerting on symptoms and SLO burn rather than every cause, and make telemetry easy to query during incidents (consistent labels such as service, version, environment, region). Include deploy markers so regressions are easy to correlate with changes.
Key Points
- Instrumentation built into templates.
- Logs, metrics, traces correlated.
- SLO-based alerting with runbooks.
- Control cardinality, volume and cost.
Deep dive: Observability and Operations
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