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Systems Engineering Track

Observability and Production Engineering

Say which statistic can see which failure and which cannot in principle, price a metric before adding a label, turn an SLO into an alert that fires on damage rather than a threshold, and follow one identifier from a burn alert to the line that explains it.

Advanced · production systems
About 180 min reading
35 authored sections

Before you start: A service you operate, and the earlier systems courses or equivalent experience with tail latency and queueing.

Plan for 5–7 hours of hands-on work in addition to reading. This is an initial estimate; setup and extensions vary.

Open before purchase

A useful preview, not a teaser

Read these complete sections to judge the technical depth, teaching style, and architecture standard before buying.

Preview 1

Course Contract: What You Will Be Able to Operate

Ninth in the sequence: measuring the system, promising something about it, and responding when the promise breaks.

Preview 2

Three Shapes, Not Three Tools

The distinction is what each one is indexed by, and that decides what belongs in it.

Preview 3

The Average Is the Statistic Designed Not to See This

The break. Two services, one number, and no way to tell them apart.

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Complete curriculum

35 sections · 4 parts + signals studio

Course orientation

  1. Course ContractFree
  2. Start Here If You Are NewCourse Pass
  3. The System So FarCourse Pass

Part 1 · What to Measure

  1. Three Shapes, Not Three ToolsFree
  2. The Average Cannot See ItFree
  3. You Cannot Average a p99Course Pass
  4. Why the Metric Type MattersCourse Pass
  5. One Label, 34 Billion SeriesCourse Pass
  6. Four Signals, RED and USECourse Pass

Part 2 · Promising Something

  1. Measurement and PromiseCourse Pass
  2. The Budget and the BurnCourse Pass
  3. Two Windows, Two QuestionsCourse Pass
  4. The Page That Was NoiseCourse Pass
  5. What On-Call Is ForCourse Pass

Part 3 · Finding It

  1. A Trace Is a Causal GraphCourse Pass
  2. The Trace That StoppedCourse Pass
  3. Sampling the One You NeedCourse Pass
  4. Events, Not SentencesCourse Pass
  5. One Id, Three SignalsCourse Pass
  6. No Debugger HereCourse Pass
  7. When the Code Is the ProblemCourse Pass

Part 4 · Learning From It

  1. The First Five MinutesCourse Pass
  2. What Blameless MeansCourse Pass
  3. MTTD, MTTR and What They HideCourse Pass
  4. Work That Scales With TrafficCourse Pass
  5. Most Incidents Are ChangesCourse Pass

Signals Studio

  1. Lab 1 · Identical MeansCourse Pass
  2. Lab 2 · Burn RateCourse Pass
  3. Lab 3 · The ProductCourse Pass
  4. Challenge · Burn From CountersCourse Pass

Architect’s Desk

  1. ADR-009 · The SLOCourse Pass
  2. When Not to InstrumentCourse Pass
  3. Review This MonitoringCourse Pass
  4. AssessmentCourse Pass
  5. ReferencesCourse Pass