Modern cloud applications are highly services-driven and leverage a lot of APIs including external APIs such as Twitter Auth API, Twilio API, Google Maps API, and various PaaS APIs. In a previous blog post, we had talked about the shift from monolithic architectures to microservices and the implications of that change from an operational perspective for Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and DevOps engineers.
In this blog post, we focus on the golden signals of monitoring that are the foundation of service-level observability for large-scale production applications. These golden signals ultimately help measure end-user experience, service abandonment and impact on business. After discussing these signals, we describe how we have approached their measurement in a way that is fundamentally different from the existing approaches that primarily require code-embedded agents or instrumentation of code.