When Your Metrics Lie: The Illusion of Observability

Green dashboards don't mean healthy users. Most teams monitor infrastructure (CPU, memory, disk) instead of outcomes (checkout success, error rates, p99 latency). The fix: define 2–3 SLIs tied to what users actually do, set SLOs on them, alert on error budget burn rate — not infra blips. Audit your alerts, add synthetic monitoring on critical user flows, and ask customer success what broke before engineering noticed. Everything else is noise.