Alerts that page for symptoms, and the limits of one Prometheus

Write symptom-based alerts with recording rules and error-budget burn rates, route them through Alertmanager, and learn where a single Prometheus server runs out of room. Part 3 of a series.

October 8, 2026 · 15 min · Omar Crosby

Your first metrics: instrument one app and ask three questions

Instrument one small app with a counter and a histogram, run Prometheus 3.x in Docker Compose, and answer how much, how broken, and how slow with three PromQL queries. Part 2 of a series.

October 8, 2026 · 15 min · Omar Crosby

Monitoring tells you it broke; observability helps you ask why

What observability is, how it differs from monitoring, what metrics, logs, and traces each answer, and the vocabulary (SLOs, RED, USE, golden signals) to learn before you pick a tool. Part 1 of a series.

October 8, 2026 · 12 min · Omar Crosby