The monitoring cheatsheet — metric types, PromQL patterns, log aggregation, tracing fundamentals, and SLO/SLI definitions with alerting rules that page correctly.
One comprehensive cheatsheet covering the monitoring stack from metrics to alerting: the four golden signals, PromQL query patterns that work on real production data, structured logging conventions, tracing fundamentals, and SLO/SLI definitions that turn "is it up?" into a measurable engineering question.
Monitoring & Observability Cheatsheet
# CPU usage per instance (excluding idle)
100 - (avg by (instance) (rate(node_cpu_seconds_total{mode="idle"}[5m])) * 100)
# HTTP error rate as a percentage
sum(rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[5m]))
/ sum(rate(http_requests_total[5m])) * 100
# 95th percentile request latency
histogram_quantile(0.95,
sum by (le) (rate(http_request_duration_seconds_bucket[5m]))
)
# Memory available vs total, per node
node_memory_MemAvailable_bytes / node_memory_MemTotal_bytes
The single most valuable monitoring rule: page on symptoms your users feel, not on causes your systems have.
| Alert on (symptom) | Don't page on (cause) | |---|---| | Error rate over 1% for 5 minutes | A single pod restarting | | p95 latency above 500ms | CPU at 90% on one node | | SLO burn rate over 14.4x | Disk above 85% (ticket instead) |
Causes belong in dashboards and tickets. Symptoms belong in pagers. The sheet includes a fast-burn/slow-burn SLO alert pair — the pattern that catches both sudden outages and slow degradation without paging anyone at 3am for a disk that isn't full yet.
$9.00
Does the sheet cover OpenTelemetry? The tracing section uses OpenTelemetry concepts and terminology (spans, attributes, propagators). For a full OTel deep-dive see the OpenTelemetry production debugging article; the sheet is the at-a-desk reference.
Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, or Mimir?
The PromQL syntax is shared. The sheet flags the few vendor-specific functions (like rollup differences) where they matter.
Are the cheatsheets updated? Yes — buyers get re-download access to new revisions through the library page.