Business Metrics
Orders per minute alongside error rate, because healthy is not enough.
3 to work through
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intermediate
A marketplace's technical dashboards are all green during a checkout failure that costs significant revenue. What kind of monitoring was missing?
2 min answer -
intermediate
A marketplace's technical metrics are all healthy during an incident in which sellers cannot list items. Why did technical monitoring miss it, and what should be measured?
2 min answer -
advanced
Customers reported an outage 40 minutes before your monitoring did. How do you close that gap?
2 min answer
3 terms in this topic
Business Metric Alerting
Alerting on product outcomes rather than on technical signals, because it is the only way to catch failures where the system works correctly and prod…
practiceBusiness Metric Instrumentation
Emitting metrics for business outcomes — orders, payments, signups — alongside technical telemetry, so incidents can be detected and prioritised by impact.
metricBusiness Metrics
Measuring what the system exists to do — frequently the fastest and most reliable outage detector available.
Neighbouring topics
Observability
General material on understanding a system from its outputs.
Logging
What to log, at what level, and what must never appear in a log.
Structured Logging
Machine-parseable events with stable names and consistent fields.
Metrics
Counters, gauges and histograms, and percentiles rather than means.
Cardinality
The label that multiplies series count and the bill with it.
Distributed Tracing
Reconstructing one request's path across every service it touched.
Correlation IDs
One identifier propagated through every hop and every log line.
Sampling
Head-based versus tail-based, and keeping the traces that matter.
Health Checks
Liveness versus readiness, and the check that causes the outage.
Alerting
Symptom-based, actionable, user-impacting — and linked to a runbook.
Alert Fatigue
How noise makes the real page invisible, and the structural fix.
Dashboards
Answering 'is it us' in under a minute, for someone who was asleep.
Application Performance Monitoring
Attributing latency to code paths, queries and dependencies.
Profiling
Continuous CPU and memory attribution in production.
SLO Monitoring
Burn-rate alerting that fires on user impact rather than on thresholds.
Log Management
Aggregation, retention tiering, search and the cost of keeping everything.
Telemetry Cost
Observability bills that rival compute, and where to cut without going blind.
Debugging Distributed Systems
Localising a regression when every service reports healthy.
OpenTelemetry
Instrumenting once against an open standard rather than a vendor agent.