What are the four Golden Signals?

The concept of the four Golden Signals, originating from Google's Site Reliability Engineering Handbook, provides a framework for monitoring the performance and reliability of complex distributed systems by focusing on latency, traffic, error rate, and resource saturation. These metrics help organizations understand how their systems are operating, identify potential issues, and improve user experience by offering insight into how systems respond to demand and manage resources. By utilizing application performance monitoring tools and configuring alerts for these metrics, teams can proactively address issues before they impact users. The Golden Signals simplify the vast amount of observability data generated by modern systems, allowing teams to focus on critical performance indicators. To effectively implement these signals, organizations are encouraged to use guides from observability providers like Datadog and New Relic, and to conduct reliability tests with tools such as Gremlin to ensure monitors are functioning correctly and providing accurate insights.