The observability vendors charge by the byte. They want you to send everything. The industry tells you to measure everything. So you instrument everything, send it all to your vendor, and wait for clarity.

Instead, you get an Observability bill that’s higher than your AWS or GCP compute costs. And you still can’t answer basic questions: Is my application healthy? Are customers experiencing problems right now? Should I be paging someone?

Even with a top-tier vendor and unlimited budget, more data doesn’t equal more clarity. You’re drowning in metrics, dashboards, and alerts — but you still don’t know what actually matters.

Quick reference for Prometheus Query Language (PromQL) with practical examples for monitoring, alerting, and SLO calculations. Covers essential functions, aggregations, and common patterns for effective Observability.

Every alert should have a Runbook. (Sometimes called Playbook.) A Runbook is a guide for SREs, DevOps, On-Call engineers, and Software Developers that prescribes potential remediations for specific alerts. The goal is to reduce MTTR and improve incident response with structured troubleshooting, verification steps, and escalation paths for SRE and DevOps teams. A place to build and share knowledge about a potential event.

You’ve deployed the generated SLO rules to Prometheus - now what? The recording rules are pre-computing your SLO metrics every minute, but how do you actually check if you’re meeting your targets, monitor error budget consumption, or build dashboards? This guide shows you the essential PromQL queries to unlock the full power of your SLO monitoring, from checking current status to visualizing long-term trends.