1 min lesson
Golden signals and alerting on symptoms
Use "Symptoms page, saturation warns early and raw traffic mostly informs" to describe the practical rule.
Step 1 of 3
Golden signals and alerting on symptomsalert on what users feel
Not every signal deserves a page. Rank the four by how directly a user feels them: symptoms page, saturation warns early and raw traffic mostly informs.
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Full explanation
What Earns a 3am Page
Interactive diagram. Tab through its regions; each focused region shows its detail in the panel below.
The four golden signals ranked by how hard you page on them - user-facing symptoms page, capacity is a leading indicator, raw demand mostly informs.
The discipline behind "alert on symptoms, not causes" is that one user-facing symptom can have many causes and you'll burn out an on-call rotation paging on every cause that might one day matter. Page when the SLO is at risk; investigate the cause once you're already awake.