Operations Monitoring Observability

Monitoring & Alerting Plan Prompt

Decide what to watch before you ship — the signals, thresholds, and alerts for a release, so a silent failure pages you instead of surfacing in a support ticket.

Overview

Most releases ship with the monitoring of whatever existed before — which is blind to the new failure modes the change introduces. This prompt plans monitoring and alerting for a specific release: the signals worth watching, the thresholds that distinguish healthy from broken, which deserve a page versus a dashboard, and the silent-failure modes that need a synthetic check.

How to use this resource

  1. Describe the release and its risks

    Note what is shipping and the new failure modes it could introduce. The plan picks the signals and thresholds for this release, not whatever monitoring already existed.

  2. Open this resource in Markdown Output Builder

    Load the prompt into Markdown Output Builder and fill in the change. It returns the monitoring plan - signals, thresholds, and alerts - as a clean Markdown reference.

  3. Walk through the signals and alerts

    Read the signals worth watching, the thresholds that separate healthy from broken, which deserve a page versus a dashboard, and the silent-failure modes that need a synthetic check.

  4. Fill the gaps before you ship

    Add coverage for any new failure mode the plan surfaces, then wire the alerts up so a silent failure pages you instead of reaching a support ticket.

Why This Works

  • Distinguishing page-worthy from dashboard kills alert fatigue
  • Most outages are silent failures — this plans for the ones with no error
  • Change-specific signals beat reusing yesterday's dashboards

Best for

  • Releases that introduce new failure modes
  • Services where failures currently surface as support tickets
  • Teams drowning in non-actionable alerts

Not for

  • Setting up the monitoring infrastructure itself
  • Post-incident analysis — this is pre-deploy planning

Use cases

  • Defining alerts for a new feature before it ships
  • Catching silent failures that throw no error
  • Cutting alert noise down to urgent, actionable pages

FAQ

How does this plan decide what pages on-call versus what goes to a dashboard?

By one rule applied to every signal. The ALERTS step and RULES require that every page be urgent AND actionable, or it becomes a dashboard item — no noisy pages. So a signal you can't act on is demoted to the first-look dashboard list rather than paging someone. It's a plan you review and wire up, not a monitoring system that gets configured for you.

Does this catch failures that don't throw an error?

That's its distinctive step. The SILENT FAILURES section targets failure modes that produce no error and pairs each with the synthetic check or business-metric alert that would catch it, and the RULES stress covering what breaks WITHOUT throwing an error. The plan surfaces candidates for a specific release; you still confirm the thresholds and own whether each is right before shipping.

What should I put in the change description before running this?

Describe what's shipping and the new behavior or failure modes it introduces at the INPUT marker. The plan picks signals and thresholds for this specific release rather than reusing existing monitoring, and it derives golden signals — latency, traffic, errors, saturation — plus change-specific ones from what you supply. The markdown-output-builder returns the plan as a signals table you then review.

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