Operations & Cloud / 2026 Essentials
Monitor the Service Experience, Not Only CPU Usage
Use service-level signals to understand whether people can complete their work.
A server can have healthy CPU usage while customers cannot sign in. Monitoring should expose meaningful service behaviour and support investigation. Google’s SRE guidance discusses dashboards, useful statistical views, and alerts with proportional responses, rather than treating every metric as an emergency.
What matters
- Track request success, latency, and the health of important dependencies.
- Use percentiles where averages hide slow experiences for a subset of users.
- Build views appropriate to the people making operational or business decisions.
Practical example: An office application dashboard shows failed logins and slow report requests alongside its database and host metrics.
One action today: Add one measure of successful user activity to an existing infrastructure dashboard.