Monitoring and Observability: measure and investigate

Objectives and progression

A six-module technical course with fictional APS examples. Learn to interpret signals, construct coherent metrics, correlate traces, control cardinality and sensitive data, define alerts, and prepare operational handover. Includes selected OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Google SRE, and Dynatrace Classic concepts with an internal assessment of 24 decisions in 60 minutes.

Audience: APS L2/L3, infrastructure, SRE, systems administration teams, and technical managers.

Prerequisites: HTTP, application, and production-support fundamentals; examples state scope and limitations.

300 estimated study minutes

• Relate technical signals to useful user operations.
• Interpret rates, percentiles, missing data, and cardinality.
• Follow distributed operations without mistaking partial telemetry for a complete history.
• Prepare useful, controlled, sustainable production telemetry.
• Connect alerts to impact, error budgets, and operational action.
• Combine evidence, synthetic checks, and acceptance criteria for operations.

Modules

1. Signals and service outcomes
2. Metrics and queries
3. Traces and context
4. Instrumentation and protection
5. Alerts and objectives
6. Diagnosis and operational handover

Continue learning

Technical assessments

• Application Production Support
• Production Support L3
• High Availability
• HTTP / HTTPS

References and version

Observability 2026-09; selected OpenTelemetry, Prometheus and Dynatrace Classic concepts

• Telemetry signals · 2026-09-30
• Spans traces and links · 2026-09-30
• Context propagation and correlation · 2026-09-30
• Head and tail sampling · 2026-09-30
• Sensitive telemetry minimization and redaction · 2026-09-30
• Baggage propagation and trust limits · 2026-09-30
• Collector internal pipeline telemetry · 2026-09-30
• Classic native histograms and summaries · 2026-09-30
• Metric units and label cardinality · 2026-09-30
• PromQL rate aggregation and absent-series functions · 2026-09-30
• Pending firing and alert annotations · 2026-09-30
• Grouping inhibition and silencing · 2026-09-30
• Batch and pipeline instrumentation · 2026-09-30
• User symptoms golden signals and actionable monitoring · 2026-09-30
• SLO burn-rate alerting and traffic limitations · 2026-09-30
• Dynatrace Classic HTTP and browser synthetic monitoring · 2026-09-30