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LetsGit.IT/Categories/Observability
Observabilityeasy

What dashboards are must-have for a critical API?

Tags
#dashboards#red#slo
Back to categoryPractice quiz

Answer

At minimum: RED metrics (rate, errors, duration), saturation (CPU/memory), dependency health, and SLO burn-rate. Include breakdowns by route, region, and version.

Advanced answer

Deep dive

Dashboards should answer "are we healthy" and "where is it broken":

  • RED: request rate, error rate, duration (p50/p95/p99).
  • Saturation: CPU, memory, thread pools, queue depth.
  • Dependencies: DB latency, cache hit ratio, downstream status.
  • SLO: burn-rate over 1h/6h windows.

Examples

A good top row:

RPS | Error % | p95/p99 latency | SLO burn-rate

Common pitfalls

  • Too many charts without a narrative.
  • Missing breakdowns by version or region.
  • No links to traces/logs from the dashboard.

Interview follow-ups

  • How do you choose time windows for p95/p99?
  • What do you show to executives vs on-call?
  • How do you keep dashboards from going stale?

Related questions

Observability
Explain the RED and USE methodologies and when to use them.
#red#use#metrics
Observability
How do you design actionable alerts to reduce noise?
#alerting#slo#oncall
Observability
What is an SLI and how do you define one?
#sli#slo#reliability