Monitoring and Alerting Strategy - Interview Guide

I build monitoring around the three pillars: metrics for system health (CPU, memory, latency percentiles, error rates), structured logs for debugging, and distributed traces for understanding request flow across services. For alerting, I follow two rules: every alert must be actionable, and if it fires, someone must need to do something. I use SLO-based alerting — rather than alerting on individual metrics, alert when the error budget is burning too fast. This reduces noise dramatically. In my last role, I revamped our alerting from 200+ alerts (most ignored) to 30 high-signal alerts. On-call response time improved from 45 minutes to under 5 minutes because engineers trusted the alerts were real.