Short engineering judgment pieces
These are intentionally short. They’re not tutorials — they’re how I think.
1) Dashboards lie unless you define the question
Dashboards are great for exploration, but production decisions need SLIs/SLOs and clear ownership.
2) Variable-izing everything is not “best practice”
Generalization has a cost. Some dashboards should be hardcoded when the use case is scoped. Forced variables create noise and performance issues.
3) “Alerts are bad” is lazy — bad alerts are bad
A good paging policy is simple: page on user-impact, ticket on symptoms, and route by owner.
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