Observability · 12 min read Sowmya Shree
The Four Golden Signals, Reimagined for AI Systems
What SREs already know about reliability — and what changes when the workload is an LLM.
Archives
All the articles I've archived.
2026 7
January 6
- Observability
Building Multi-Region Synthetic Monitoring with Grafana Open Source (For Free)
Synthetic monitoring is expensive because it's outsourced, not because it's hard. Here's how to build multi-region browser monitoring with Grafana open source tools for free.
· 4 min read Sowmya Shree - Observability
The Four Layers of Truth: Monitoring Journeys, Not Just Servers
How to structure your observability stack across four layers — from synthetic journeys to distributed traces — to answer the only question that matters.
· 4 min read Sowmya Shree - Glossary
The Primitive Shapes of Reliability (SRE Glossary)
The core concepts every Platform Engineer must know: SLIs, SLOs, Error Budgets, Toil, and Blameless Post-Mortems — distilled.
· 3 min read Sowmya Shree - Platform
Terraform is Not Enough: Why "Infrastructure as Code" Drifts
The lie we tell ourselves about IaC — and how Configuration Drift silently undermines your Terraform state.
· 4 min read Sowmya Shree - Practice
Reliability is a Feature, Not a Guardrail
Why "100% uptime" is the wrong goal, and how to build systems that embrace failure instead of fighting it.
· 4 min read Sowmya Shree - Observability
The Millisecond Watchdog: Monitoring Rules for Low-Latency Trading
In low-latency trading, averages are lies. Here are the monitoring rules — covering market data, execution, and post-trade reconciliation — that actually matter.
· 4 min read Sowmya Shree
2025 10
March 2
- Observability
Distributed Tracing 101: Following a Request Across a Hundred Services
Logs tell you what happened inside one service. Metrics tell you the aggregate shape of your system. Only tracing tells you the story of a single request's journey.
· 11 min read Sowmya Shree - Incidents
Alert Fatigue Is a Design Flaw, Not a Personality Problem
When engineers start ignoring pages, the fix isn't a memo about vigilance. It's a redesign of what earns the right to interrupt a human being at 3 AM.
· 10 min read Sowmya Shree