Observability Best Practices for Always-On Teams

Lead with unified telemetry intake

Great observability starts with shared context. Stream logs, traces, metrics, and synthetic checks into a schema everyone can query so you never lose time hopping between tabs.

Normalize tags for service, owner, region, feature flag, and deployment hash. That metadata lets you pivot from a failed customer workflow to the precise code push that triggered it in seconds.

Instrument what the business cares about

SLOs and SLIs should trace back to customer promises, not vanity metrics. Start with the journeys that drive revenue or renewals and model the steps that can degrade.

Layer Watch Dog's HTTP, DNS, SSL, and port monitors on top of product telemetry so you can confirm whether an issue is user-facing, infrastructure, or third party.

Business-back SLOs prevent churn because you only wake people up for issues customers can feel.

Automate the boring response

Every incident should trigger templated comms, runbook steps, and escalation logic. Use Watch Dog webhooks to create incidents in Slack or PagerDuty the instant a synthetic check fails.

Pair automation with review cadences: add a 15-minute retro form to capture what helped, what slowed you down, and new telemetry gaps.

Share post-incident intelligence

SEO loves freshness and so do engineers. Convert hard-won learnings into public changelog posts, FAQ updates, and enablement decks. This multiplies the value of every outage.

Include a recap chart, the sequence of mitigations, and next best actions for affected customers.