Observability Maturity Model #

Use this model to assess and improve your observability posture.

Level 1 — Basic visibility #

• host-level metrics only
• ad-hoc dashboarding
• limited alert quality

Level 2 — Service awareness #

• service dashboards and error-rate alerts
• centralized logging
• on-call ownership established

Level 3 — Distributed insight #

• tracing across critical request paths
• SLI/SLO reporting
• runbooks connected to alerts

Level 4 — Proactive reliability #

• anomaly detection and capacity forecasting
• error budget policy in release decisions
• incident trend analysis and prevention backlog

Level 5 — Adaptive operations #

• platform-level observability standards
• self-service instrumentation templates
• reliability controls integrated into SDLC and deployment gates

First improvements to prioritize #

• define top 3 user-critical journeys
• implement SLOs for those journeys
• eliminate noisy alerts
• add trace IDs to logs across services