The four Golden Signals of Monitoring

Golden Signals are a concept introduced by Google to provide a focused set of metrics for monitoring services, especially useful in environments like Kubernetes. The four Golden Signals—Latency, Traffic, Errors, and Saturation—offer a comprehensive overview of a service's performance from a user perspective. Latency measures the time to serve requests, Traffic assesses service usage over time, Errors track the rate of failed requests, and Saturation gauges resource consumption. These metrics help identify potential issues affecting application behavior, enabling quicker detection and resolution. The RED and USE methods are alternative approaches inspired by the Golden Signals, emphasizing different aspects of system performance. Proper implementation of these monitoring techniques, often supported by tools like Prometheus and Grafana, can enhance system reliability and efficiency, while also providing insights into resource management and user experience.