Observability & SRE

Built for the incident, not the dashboard demo

Turn telemetry into faster diagnosis, trusted alerts and reliability decisions grounded in what users and the business actually experience.

Observability must still make sense at 3 a.m.

Observability tooling is usually selected in a calm period and judged during an incident. That is when crowded dashboards, noisy alerts and stale runbooks show their cost. An SLO chosen because it was easy to measure may say the service is healthy while users cannot complete a critical journey. Our Observability & SRE service begins with user impact and failure modes. We design service-level indicators, telemetry, dashboards, alerts and response procedures around operational questions the team must answer quickly. Existing tools are improved where possible; adding another platform is not the default answer.

What we build and improve

A useful signal path from user experience to engineering action.

• Defensible SLOs

  Indicators and objectives derived from user and business impact, with error budgets linked to real prioritisation decisions.

• High-signal dashboards

  Focused service views using methods such as RED and USE instead of a wall of panels without a clear starting point.

• Actionable alerting

  Pages represent symptoms requiring human action, with thresholds tuned to reduce noise and restore trust in on-call.

• Runbooks that are exercised

  Incident instructions live beside alerts and are tested against simulations or game days rather than saved until a real outage.

• Distributed tracing

  OpenTelemetry or existing APM traces connect latency and errors across service boundaries for quicker diagnosis.

• On-call and incident process

  Rotation, escalation, communications and blameless review practices turn incidents into owned engineering improvements.

Build reliability around real failure modes

• Baseline

  Review telemetry, existing objectives, alert noise, recent incidents and on-call pain points.

• Define

  Agree the user journeys, indicators and service expectations that should drive reliability work.

• Instrument

  Implement and tune metrics, logs, traces, dashboards and actionable alert conditions.

• Exercise

  Test runbooks and escalation through simulations, then convert findings into owned improvements.

Error budgets make the trade-off explicit

An SLO becomes valuable when its error budget influences decisions. When the budget is healthy, teams can accept reasonable delivery risk. When consumption crosses an agreed threshold, reliability work becomes a planned response rather than a political argument during a stressful week. The threshold is agreed before anyone has a stake in a particular release. This operating model also prevents observability from becoming a collection project. Telemetry is retained because it supports a decision, investigation or service objective. Alerts have owners and response paths. Post-incident actions return to engineering backlogs with enough context to be prioritised and completed.

Observability and incident technology

• Prometheus
• Grafana
• OpenTelemetry
• Loki
• Jaeger
• Datadog
• New Relic
• Honeycomb
• PagerDuty
• Opsgenie

Related expertise

Combine this service with the capabilities needed for a complete, operable platform.

• Kubernetes Platform Engineering

  Make workload and cluster health part of an operable platform baseline.

• CI/CD Modernization

  Use production signals to guide progressive rollout and rollback.

• Data Platform Engineering

  Monitor replication, consumer lag, backup status, freshness and data quality.

Observability and SRE questions

• We already have Datadog or Grafana. Do we still need this?

  Possibly. Having tooling and having a useful operating signal are different things. Much of the value may come from restructuring and tuning the stack you already own rather than replacing it.

• How do you decide what our SLOs should be?

  We work backwards from critical user journeys and business impact, then choose measurable indicators and targets that reflect those expectations and the system's actual behaviour.

• Can you redesign the on-call process as well as tooling?

  Yes. Rotation structure, escalation, runbooks, incident roles and review practices can be included because reliability fails at the human layer as well as the technical one.

• Do you run game days or chaos exercises?

  We can design and facilitate controlled exercises with your team. Scope and safeguards are agreed first so the exercise builds confidence without creating unacceptable production risk.

Make the next incident easier to understand

Tell us where diagnosis, alert noise or ownership is failing today. We will identify the signal and process improvements that matter most.