Notes on API and vendor monitoring
Uptime checks, incident response, SLA tracking, and the parts of vendor monitoring that actually matter when something breaks.
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SLA vs SLO vs SLI: The Definitive Guide for Platform Engineers
Confused by the acronym soup of reliability engineering? This guide demystifies SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs with real-world examples, calculation formulas, and a calculator to find your error budget before it finds you.
Synthetic Monitoring vs Real-User Monitoring: Which Do You Need?
Synthetic checks simulate user behavior 24/7; RUM captures actual user sessions. Neither is complete alone. Learn how to layer both strategies, reduce alert noise by 68%, and surface the performance regressions that matter.
Webhook Delivery Guarantees: At-Least-Once vs Exactly-Once Semantics
Most API platforms promise webhook delivery but rarely guarantee it. This deep-dive covers retry strategies, idempotency keys, exponential backoff, and how to build a webhook infrastructure with 99.99% delivery confidence.
Root Cause Analysis Done Right: The 5 Whys & Beyond
The 5 Whys is a useful tool, but only if you avoid common traps: stopping too early, assigning blame, and ignoring systemic factors. Walk through three real post-mortems and learn what a blameless RCA looks like in practice.
Calculating Your Error Budget: A Step-by-Step Workbook
An error budget is the difference between 100% uptime and your SLO target, and it's the key to balancing feature velocity with reliability. This workbook provides formulas, real examples, and a decision framework.
Embedding a Live Status Widget: Technical Implementation Guide
Surface real-time API status directly in your product, no redirects, no friction. This guide covers the embed architecture, iframe sandboxing, WebSocket-powered live updates, and CORS configuration for cross-origin widgets.
Rate Limiting Strategies for High-Traffic APIs: A Comparative Analysis
Token bucket, leaky bucket, fixed window, sliding window, each rate-limiting algorithm has tradeoffs. We benchmarked all four under 100k req/s load with Redis and compared accuracy, fairness, and latency overhead.
On-Call Rotation Design: Sustainable Reliability Without Burnout
Pager burnout is a real crisis in reliability engineering. This guide covers on-call rotation design, escalation policies, alert fatigue reduction, and how auto-grouping cuts mean time-to-acknowledge by 42%.
How to Set Up Real-Time Status Monitoring for Your Entire GCP Infrastructure
A step-by-step guide to monitoring every Google Cloud Platform service your stack depends on, with component-level alerts for specific regions and products, not just generic GCP health.