Full-Stack Observability: Metrics, Logs, Traces
Unified observability platform with Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Tempo for complete system visibility
70%
Faster MTTR
100%
Service Coverage
80%
Less Alert Noise
Quick Facts
Industry: FinTech Platform
Services: 45 microservices
Timeline: 10 weeks
Data Volume: 2TB logs/day
Stack: Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Grafana
The Challenge
A fintech platform with 45 microservices had fragmented observability: Datadog for some services, CloudWatch for others, and various logging solutions. Troubleshooting an incident meant searching through 5 different tools, and there was no correlation between metrics, logs, and traces.
Alert fatigue was rampant with 200+ daily alerts, most of which were false positives. MTTR was averaging 4 hours because engineers couldn't quickly identify root causes. The observability tools cost was also growing unsustainably at $15K/month.
Pain Points
❌ 5 different monitoring tools with no correlation
❌ 200+ daily alerts, mostly false positives
❌ 4-hour average MTTR
❌ No distributed tracing across services
❌ $15K/month observability tool spend
Our Solution
📊
Prometheus & Mimir
Deployed Prometheus for metrics collection with Mimir for long-term storage. Created standardized recording rules and alerting templates. Implemented service-level indicators (SLIs) for all critical paths.
📝
Loki for Logs
Migrated all services to structured logging with Loki. Implemented smart retention policies (hot/warm/cold) reducing storage costs by 60%. Enabled log-to-trace correlation via trace IDs.
🔍
Tempo for Traces
Implemented OpenTelemetry across all services for distributed tracing. Auto-instrumentation for common frameworks plus manual spans for business logic. Trace-to-logs linking for seamless debugging.
📈
Unified Grafana Dashboards
Built service-level dashboards with metrics, logs, and traces in single view. Created SLO dashboards with error budgets. Implemented on-call dashboards with runbook links.
Results
70%
Faster MTTR
4 hours → 70 minutes
80%
Less Alert Noise
200 → 40 alerts/day
60%
Cost Reduction
$15K → $6K/month
100%
Service Coverage
All 45 services
Frequently Asked Questions
What is full-stack observability?
Combining metrics, logs, and traces to provide complete visibility into system behavior and enable faster troubleshooting across distributed systems.
What is the Grafana LGTM stack?
Loki (logs), Grafana (visualization), Tempo (traces), and Mimir (metrics) - an open-source observability stack with unified querying and native signal correlation.
How does distributed tracing help?
It tracks requests across microservices, showing latency at each step, identifying bottlenecks, and revealing error sources through a single trace ID.
How long does implementation take?
Typically 8-12 weeks: infrastructure setup (2-3 weeks), instrumentation (3-4 weeks), dashboards (2-3 weeks), and alerting (1-2 weeks).
Related Resources
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