When your payment gateway goes down at 3 AM and users can't pay for their orders, every minute of downtime costs money. I know this from experience: before implementing a proper observability system, our mean time to recovery (MTTR) was almost 4 hours. We learned about problems from customers, not from monitoring. It was painful.
So I decided to radically change my approach and took the "Observability (Prometheus, Grafana)" course on the asibiont.com platform. Let me tell you how this training helped me build a system that now catches incidents before they become critical and reduced MTTR by 60%.
Why observability, not just monitoring?
Many people think monitoring and observability are the same thing. But the difference is fundamental. Monitoring answers the question "what is broken?", while observability answers "why is it broken?". This knowledge allows you not only to notice failures but also to quickly find their root cause.
On the course, I understood the key concepts:
- The three pillars of observability: metrics, logs, and traces. Metrics show the state of the system (e.g., CPU, request count), logs show event details, and traces show the path of a request through services.
- SLI/SLO: Service Level Indicators and Service Level Objectives. We learned to define what "good" means for us and measure it. For example, the SLI "API response time" and the SLO "99.9% of requests faster than 200 ms".
- Distributed tracing: when you have many microservices, without traces it's impossible to understand where time is lost.
Tools that really work
The course is built around a practical stack used in production:
- OpenTelemetry — an open standard for collecting telemetry. With it, we instrumented services without vendor lock-in.
- Prometheus — a system for collecting and storing metrics. I learned to write PromQL queries, configure metric collection from Kubernetes and applications.
- Grafana — visualization and dashboards. I created dashboards where problems are immediately visible.
- Loki — log aggregation to search for errors by phrases like
status=500. - Blackbox monitoring — checking service availability from the outside via HTTP, TCP, DNS.
How learning on asibiont.com works
The most unusual thing is AI-generated lessons. The platform uses a neural network that adapts the program to your level. I started with basic concepts, but after a couple of lessons I was already analyzing real cases from practice. The AI explains complex things in simple language, gives practical tasks, and answers questions — like a personal mentor.
The training is text-based, which is a plus for me: you can read at any time, return to difficult topics, take notes. 24/7 access is ideal for a working engineer.
Real case: how we reduced MTTR
A month after starting the course, I implemented the knowledge in my payment gateway. Here's what we did:
- Set up SLI/SLO: defined key metrics — API response time, percentage of successful payments, 5xx errors.
- Integrated OpenTelemetry: added tracing to microservices to see the request path.
- Created dashboards in Grafana: on one screen you can see the status of all services, payment queue, errors.
- Configured alerting: Prometheus sends notifications to Telegram when SLO is violated.
- Automated runbooks: now during an incident, the system itself suggests what to do — step-by-step instructions in Grafana.
Result: MTTR dropped from 4 hours to 1.5. We started noticing problems before mass complaints. For example, when the payment gateway response time increased, the alert came 10 minutes before users started complaining.
Who is this course for?
- SRE and DevOps engineers who want to level up.
- Backend developers who need to understand how their code behaves in production.
- Team leads and tech leads responsible for service reliability.
- Anyone tired of fighting fires and wanting a systematic approach to monitoring.
If you are familiar with the basics of Linux and Docker, it will be easy. If not, the AI tutor will help fill the gaps.
Why AI learning is the future
Traditional courses often suffer from "fluff" and outdated information. AI learning on asibiont.com solves these problems: the neural network generates lessons tailored to your request, adapts complexity and focus. You don't waste time on what you already know, and you get explanations exactly for the topics that are difficult for you.
Start today
If you want your services to run stably and stop night calls to on-call engineers, I recommend the "Observability (Prometheus, Grafana)" course on asibiont.com. It's an investment that pays off with the first prevented incident.
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