Monitoring & Observability Bundle

One comprehensive cheatsheet covering the monitoring stack from metrics to alerting: the four golden signals, PromQL query patterns that work on real production data, structured logging conventions, tracing fundamentals, and SLO/SLI definitions that turn "is it up?" into a measurable engineering question.

What's Included

Monitoring & Observability Cheatsheet

Metric types — counter, gauge, histogram, summary, and when each lies to you
The four golden signals — latency, traffic, errors, saturation
PromQL patterns — rate, aggregation, recording rules, subqueries
Alert rule design — symptom-based alerting, burn rates, alert fatigue avoidance
Log aggregation — structured logging, log levels that mean something, retention
Tracing fundamentals — spans, context propagation, sampling strategies
SLO/SLI/error budgets — definitions, measurement windows, policy templates
Dashboard layout — the one-screen production overview pattern

Excerpt — PromQL Queries You'll Actually Run

# CPU usage per instance (excluding idle)
100 - (avg by (instance) (rate(node_cpu_seconds_total{mode="idle"}[5m])) * 100)

# HTTP error rate as a percentage
sum(rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[5m]))
  / sum(rate(http_requests_total[5m])) * 100

# 95th percentile request latency
histogram_quantile(0.95,
  sum by (le) (rate(http_request_duration_seconds_bucket[5m]))
)

# Memory available vs total, per node
node_memory_MemAvailable_bytes / node_memory_MemTotal_bytes

Excerpt — Symptom-Based Alerting

The single most valuable monitoring rule: page on symptoms your users feel, not on causes your systems have.

| Alert on (symptom) | Don't page on (cause) | |---|---| | Error rate over 1% for 5 minutes | A single pod restarting | | p95 latency above 500ms | CPU at 90% on one node | | SLO burn rate over 14.4x | Disk above 85% (ticket instead) |

Causes belong in dashboards and tickets. Symptoms belong in pagers. The sheet includes a fast-burn/slow-burn SLO alert pair — the pattern that catches both sudden outages and slow degradation without paging anyone at 3am for a disk that isn't full yet.

Format

One PDF (print-ready, A4)
Instant download after purchase

Price

$9.00

Who This Is For

SREs and platform engineers responsible for production observability and alerting
Developers adding metrics instrumentation who need a PromQL quick reference
Teams adopting Prometheus and Grafana who want the essential queries and patterns in one place

FAQ

Does the sheet cover OpenTelemetry? The tracing section uses OpenTelemetry concepts and terminology (spans, attributes, propagators). For a full OTel deep-dive see the OpenTelemetry production debugging article; the sheet is the at-a-desk reference.

Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, or Mimir? The PromQL syntax is shared. The sheet flags the few vendor-specific functions (like rollup differences) where they matter.

Are the cheatsheets updated? Yes — buyers get re-download access to new revisions through the library page.