Five observability tools that make debugging calmer

Incidents feel chaotic because context is missing. This stack keeps signal high while staying manageable for a small team.

Starter stack

1. OpenTelemetry SDK to instrument once and emit everything in a consistent format.
2. Prometheus for metrics with simple sum(rate()) style queries.
3. Loki for log aggregation that matches labels from Prometheus, so pivots are instant.
4. Tempo to store traces without a mountain of config.
5. Grafana as the single pane for dashboards, alerts, and on-call runbooks.

# otel-collector snippet
receivers:
  otlp:
    protocols:
      http:
exporters:
  otlp:
    endpoint: tempo:4317
service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers: [otlp]
      exporters: [otlp]

Pair this with a one-page “how to debug” doc and you will spend less time staring at busy charts and more time fixing the actual bug.