Golden Signals

Definitions

1. Google SRE's four essential monitoring metrics: Latency (time to serve a request), Traffic (demand on the system), Errors (rate of failed requests), and Saturation (how full the system is). From the Google SRE book. Overlaps with RED Method but adds saturation. If you can only monitor four things, monitor these.

   In plain English: Google's four most important things to monitor: speed, volume, failures, and how close to capacity you are.

   Example: "Set up alerting on the four golden signals -- if any of them deviates significantly from baseline, page the on-call engineer."

Related Terms

• toil
• Android
• Incident Management
• Prometheus
• Health Check
• Time-Series Database
• Tail Latency
• RED Method
• Protocol Buffer