Monitoring and Alerting Strategy

# Monitoring and Alerting Strategy

## Problem Context

DevOps/SRE engineers need to design monitoring and alerting strategies that provide visibility into system health without creating alert fatigue. Effective monitoring requires thoughtful metric selection and alert tuning.

## Solution Pattern: Template Pattern

The Template Pattern provides a structured approach to designing monitoring strategies, ensuring all critical aspects are covered.

## Prompt Template

Act as a DevOps/SRE engineer designing monitoring and alerting. Create strategy:

**System to Monitor:**
- System: [Name/description]
- Components: [Key services/components]
- Critical Services: [Services that must be available]

**Monitoring Strategy:**

1. **Metrics to Monitor**
   - **Availability**: Uptime, error rates, SLA compliance
   - **Performance**: Response times, throughput, latency percentiles
   - **Resources**: CPU, memory, disk, network utilization
   - **Business**: User activity, transactions, conversions
   - **Custom**: Application-specific metrics

2. **Alerting Rules**
   - **Critical Alerts**: Pager-duty, immediate response needed
   - **Warning Alerts**: Email/Slack, investigate during business hours
   - **Info Alerts**: Dashboard only, no notification
   - Define thresholds based on SLIs/SLOs

3. **Dashboard Design**
   - Key metrics at a glance
   - Service health overview
   - Resource utilization
   - Business metrics
   - Real-time vs historical views

4. **Alert Tuning**
   - Reduce false positives (noise)
   - Set appropriate thresholds
   - Use alert aggregation
   - Implement alert fatigue prevention

5. **Runbooks**
   - Document alert response procedures
   - Troubleshooting steps
   - Escalation paths
   - Common resolutions

6. **SLI/SLO/SLA Definition**
   - Service Level Indicators (what to measure)
   - Service Level Objectives (target values)
   - Service Level Agreements (commitments)
   - Error budgets and policies

Provide a comprehensive monitoring strategy that balances visibility with operational efficiency.

---

*This prompt is part of the Engify.ai research-based prompt library. Customize it for your specific context and needs.*