[ [home] ](/) # Observability Checklist Catch issues before users do 1. Have I defined clear "broken" conditions that truly reflect what users experience as failure? 2. How will I be notified when my service degrades or fails? Is this notification faster than user reports? 3. What leading indicators might show trouble before a full outage occurs? Am I monitoring these? 4. Have I implemented smoke tests that regularly tests critical user journeys? 5. Are my alert thresholds set conservatively enough to give me time to respond before users notice? 6. What happens when my service experiences 2x or 10x normal load? Do I have alerts for approaching capacity limits? 7. How does my service behave when dependencies slow down or fail? Have I tested these scenarios? 8. Can I detect gradual performance degradation over time, or only sudden failures? 9. Do my dashboards clearly show service health from a user perspective, not just technical metrics? 10. When an alert fires, do I have a clear runbook for first responders to follow?