RELIABILITY · 11 MIN READ

Monitoring That Actually Helps You Sleep

What to monitor first, what to ignore, and how to build alerts that wake you up only when something is genuinely broken.

By TechVerse Team May 31, 2026

The four golden signals

1. Latency — how long do requests take?
2. Traffic — how many requests per second?
3. Errors — what fraction are failing?
4. Saturation — how full is the system?

Start there. Everything else is detail.

What to alert on

Only things that need a human awake right now. If you cannot articulate what the on-call person should do when the alert fires, the alert should not exist.