How would you run a monthly operational review using observability data and SLO trends? [Advanced]

Answer

In a monthly operational review, I use observability data to examine SLO compliance, error-budget trends, incidents, alert quality, capacity risks, cost, and top reliability actions. The output should be decisions and owners, not just dashboards.

Technical explanation

Review which services met or missed SLOs, where error budget was spent, and whether incidents had repeat causes.

Analyze alert volume, pages per service, false positives, missing alerts, and mean time to detect/resolve.

Track observability cost and coverage gaps by team, then prioritize improvements for the next month.

Hands-on example

Agenda: 1) SLO scorecard by service. 2) Top five budget burns and incident themes. 3) Alert noise and paging health. 4) Capacity and cost trends. 5) Coverage gaps in metrics/logs/traces. 6) Action register with owners, due dates, and expected reliability impact.

Source Notes

Prometheus metric types: https://prometheus.io/docs/concepts/metric_types/

Prometheus histograms and summaries: https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/histograms/

Prometheus Alertmanager: https://prometheus.io/docs/alerting/latest/alertmanager/

Prometheus Pushgateway guidance: https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/pushing/

Prometheus instrumentation practices: https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/instrumentation/

OpenTelemetry documentation: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/

OpenTelemetry Collector: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/collector/

Splunk data pipeline: https://docs.splunk.com/Splexicon:Datapipeline

Splunk Search Reference / SPL: https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/8.2.12/SearchReference/WhatsInThisManual

Splunk bucket lifecycle: https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/8.2.12/Indexer/HowSplunkstoresindexes

DX OpenExplore / Wavefront overview: https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/ca-enterprise-software/it-operations-management/dx-openexplore/saas.html

DX OpenExplore Wavefront Query Language reference: https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/ca-enterprise-software/it-operations-management/dx-openexplore/saas/query-language/query_language_reference.html

DX OpenExplore Wavefront proxy: https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/ca-enterprise-software/it-operations-management/dx-openexplore/saas/data-and-proxy/proxies.html

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