Case study 04 · Reliability engineering

Observability and alerting.

A layered monitoring design that combines infrastructure metrics, logs, synthetic availability checks, VMware visibility, dashboards, and actionable email notification.

Monitoring layers

  • Prometheus: cluster, node, controller, and application metrics.
  • Grafana: dashboards for operational visibility and trend analysis.
  • Loki and Promtail: centralized Kubernetes log collection and search.
  • Alertmanager: routing, grouping, repeat intervals, and email delivery through an internal relay.
  • Uptime Kuma: synthetic checks for service and endpoint availability.
  • Zabbix: infrastructure and VMware monitoring outside the Kubernetes-native stack.

Alert delivery

Alertmanager was integrated with an internal SMTP relay and verified end to end with a dedicated PrometheusRule. The configuration separates actionable alerts from noise, routes Watchdog-style signals away from the user receiver, and applies a repeat interval to reduce unnecessary messages.

Operational outcomes

  • One place to inspect cluster health, application state, and resource consumption.
  • Centralized logs for troubleshooting restarts, ingress failures, and application errors.
  • Email notification for conditions that need attention away from the dashboard.
  • Independent uptime checks that validate the user-facing path rather than only pod health.
  • VMware and traditional-server monitoring alongside cloud-native telemetry.

Reliability mindset

Monitoring is treated as part of the service design, not an afterthought. New workloads should expose health checks, declare resource requirements, produce useful logs, and have a clear alerting path. The objective is early detection with enough context to shorten diagnosis and recovery.

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