Observability Without Vendor Lock-In
OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and the cost of every signal
Observability shouldn't cost more than your compute bill. This manual walks through real instrumentation strategies for OpenTelemetry pipelines, cardinality budgets, sampling that actually preserves debugging signal, and the migration mechanics for moving off Datadog, New Relic, or Splunk without losing visibility. Includes complete OTLP collector configs, PromQL anti-patterns, and the financial math behind every retention policy.
Mariana spent the last decade running on-call for trading systems and global edge networks. Her work focuses on the boring failures nobody writes blog posts about: clock skew, partial partitions, and the contract between SREs and the language runtime.
- Pages
- 286
- Edition
- 1st Edition
- Language
- English
- Level
- intermediate
- ISBN
- 978-1-99999-002-9
- Published
- January 2026
Reviewed by three working engineers at peer publications before publication. We do not publish first drafts.
What you'll find inside.
- 01The Three Pillars Are Not Equal
- 02OpenTelemetry From First Principles
- 03The Cardinality Tax
- 04Sampling: Tail-based vs Head-based
- 05Metrics That Survive a Rewrite
- 06Logs as the Last Resort
- 07Tracing Through Async Boundaries
- 08Migrating Off Vendor X
- 09Building Internal Observability Platforms
