Golden Signals

ELI5 - The Vibe Check

The four golden signals are the short list Google's SRE team settled on for: if you can only watch four numbers to know whether your service is healthy, watch these. How many requests are coming in, how fast you're answering them, how often you're failing, and how close to your limits you are. Dashboards that track a thousand metrics but miss one of these are watching the wrong things.

Real Talk

The four golden signals, popularized by Google's Site Reliability Engineering book, are latency, traffic, errors, and saturation, the minimal set of metrics needed to understand a service's health at a glance. They're widely used as the baseline for what a service's primary dashboard and alerting should be built around, before adding anything more specific.

Show Me The Code

groups:
  - name: golden-signals
    rules:
      - alert: HighErrorRate
        expr: rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[5m])
              / rate(http_requests_total[5m]) > 0.02
        for: 5m
        labels: { severity: page }

When You'll Hear This

"Our new service dashboard is just the four golden signals, nothing fancy." / "We alert on the golden signals first, everything else is a debugging aid, not a page."