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name: service-mesh-observability description: Implement comprehensive observability for service meshes including distributed tracing, metrics, and visualization. Use when setting up mesh monitoring, debugging latency issues, or implementing SLOs for service communication.

Service Mesh Observability

Complete guide to observability patterns for Istio, Linkerd, and service mesh deployments.

When to Use This Skill

• Setting up distributed tracing across services
• Implementing service mesh metrics and dashboards
• Debugging latency and error issues
• Defining SLOs for service communication
• Visualizing service dependencies
• Troubleshooting mesh connectivity

Core Concepts

1. Three Pillars of Observability

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                  Observability                       │
├─────────────────┬─────────────────┬─────────────────┤
│     Metrics     │     Traces      │      Logs       │
│                 │                 │                 │
│ • Request rate  │ • Span context  │ • Access logs   │
│ • Error rate    │ • Latency       │ • Error details │
│ • Latency P50   │ • Dependencies  │ • Debug info    │
│ • Saturation    │ • Bottlenecks   │ • Audit trail   │
└─────────────────┴─────────────────┴─────────────────┘

2. Golden Signals for Mesh

Signal	Description	Alert Threshold
Latency	Request duration P50, P99	P99 > 500ms
Traffic	Requests per second	Anomaly detection
Errors	5xx error rate	> 1%
Saturation	Resource utilization	> 80%

Templates and detailed worked examples

Full template library and detailed worked examples live in references/details.md. Read that file when you need the concrete templates.

Best Practices

Do's

• Sample appropriately - 100% in dev, 1-10% in prod
• Use trace context - Propagate headers consistently
• Set up alerts - For golden signals
• Correlate metrics/traces - Use exemplars
• Retain strategically - Hot/cold storage tiers

Don'ts

• Don't over-sample - Storage costs add up
• Don't ignore cardinality - Limit label values
• Don't skip dashboards - Visualize dependencies
• Don't forget costs - Monitor observability costs