Observability Platform  ·  View 03 of 25  ·  People and journeys

Actors and Their Core Journeys

Five humans, three machines, and what each of them actually gets to do.

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The people it is built for On-call engineer 70 rotations Goal — I was paged twelve minutes ago for a service I have never opened. Tell me what is broken before my second coffee. Core journeys Page to root cause view 04 Raise my sampling mid-incident Prove the last 5 minutes exist Service owner 900 services Goal — I want my new service observable the day it ships, without filing a ticket or learning three query languages. Core journeys Onboard a service view 05 Define an SLO and burn alert Fix a cardinality rejection SRE / platform team estate-wide Goal — I need to know the platform is blind before anyone else discovers it is, and to keep one team's bad deploy off everyone else's dashboards. Core journeys Contain a cardinality incident Shed by class under a storm Prove self-telemetry is alive The people who pay for it and police it Engineering director budget holder Goal — Observability is 4% of infrastructure spend and rising. Show me what to cut that will not cost us an outage. Core journeys Cut the bill, stay sighted view 06 Read the per-team scorecard Security engineer compliance class Goal — Logs will contain personal data whatever the policy says. I need it redacted before it is written and erasable after it is. Core journeys Erase a named subject Audit who read production logs Machines in the cast Instrumented service 900 of them Goal — Take my telemetry without ever making me wait, retry or hold a buffer. Core journeys Push OTLP to the local agent Paging platform out of scope Goal — Hand me a firing alert with the owner, the indicator and a scoped view already attached. Core journeys Receive a firing alert Dead-man canary separate account Goal — Notice that the observability platform has stopped speaking, from somewhere it cannot take down with it. Core journeys Alert that the platform is blind Who the Platform Is For, and What They Get To Do Person or role Journey / task Application we own External / third party Security / platform v 1.0 · owner Reliability Architecture · date 2026-09

Why these eight

  • The on-call engineer and the service owner decide whether the platform is used. The engineering director decides whether it survives a cost review. The security engineer decides whether it is allowed to hold what it holds.
  • The dead-man canary is in the cast because it is the only actor that can tell anyone the platform has stopped working, and giving it a goal in its own voice is how it stopped being an implementation detail.

What the goals commit to

  • "A service I have never opened" is a hard requirement on generated default views and on alert context, not a wish about documentation.
  • "Without filing a ticket" makes catalogue-driven onboarding a Must Have rather than a Phase 2 convenience.

Risks

  • Three of the eight actors want less data kept and three want more. The platform cannot satisfy both without making the trade explicit per signal, which is what view 06 and ADR-19 are about.
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Solution Architecture v1.0 · Amazon Web Services with open-source collection and storage · Reliability Architecture · 2026-09 · 25 views03-actors-and-journeys