Open Source Observability Stack Essentials

Modern cloud-native applications rarely crash outright. Instead, they fail in subtle ways such as latency spikes, partial errors, or noisy dependencies. This course helps you become productive with the open-source trio used across the industry: Prometheus for metrics and PromQL analysis, Grafana for dashboards and alerting, and OpenTelemetry for standard, vendor-neutral instrumentation. You will launch a small local stack, scrape metrics, and build a practical three-panel dashboard that tracks requests, errors, and latency. Then you will create alerts that actually matter and instrument a sample service with the OpenTelemetry SDK to produce traces that can be correlated with metrics. Along the way, you will learn key observability patterns like pull versus push collection, label hygiene, histogram quantiles, and Collector pipelines. Learners should be familiar with basic Docker or Linux, YAML/JSON, and be comfortable with web apps/HTTP; Kubernetes familiarity helpful. This course is designed for software engineers, SREs, and platform engineers who want hands-on experience setting up and using an open-source observability stack to diagnose real production issues. By the end, you will have working configurations, starter queries, and a clear path to production that covers exporters, data retention, SLOs, and burn rate alerts.