A minimum viable AWS observability set that aligns engineering, finance and on-call—without dashboard sprawl.
Start with outcomes
Dashboards should answer three questions fast:
- Are customers succeeding? (golden signals for critical APIs)
- Are we about to run out of capacity? (saturation and quotas)
- Are we spending unexpectedly? (cost deltas tied to deployments)
The minimum viable set
- Service health: latency, errors, traffic (per top-tier service)
- Infra saturation: CPU, memory, disk and network for data paths
- Change correlation: deploy markers aligned to metric shifts
- Cost guardrails: top services by daily spend with tag dimensions
Anti-patterns
- One dashboard per microservice with no navigation hierarchy
- Charts nobody looks at during incidents
- Missing ownership tags so every alert becomes a treasure hunt
Closing note
Good observability is curated, not comprehensive. Start small, prove value in incidents, then expand deliberately.
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