Plan: Platform Observability Foundation

plan-2026-02-25-platform-observability Plan

plan completed

Project

Vision

Production-grade observability for the pal-e platform: engineers know when things break (alerts), can see what's happening (dashboards), can dig into why (logs + metrics), and can explain the system to others (architecture docs). Interview-presentable as a real SRE-operated system.

Projects & Repos Touched

Project/Repo	Platform	Role
pal-e-platform	Forgejo	Terraform for monitoring config (PrometheusRules, Alertmanager, dashboards)
pal-e-docs	Forgejo	Architecture docs, SRE guides, user stories

Context

Full kube-prometheus-stack + Loki deployed but using ~20% of it. Gaps: no alerting rules, no custom dashboards, no golden signal metrics, no alert routing.

What's already done: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Promtail healthy. ServiceMonitor CRD available. Grafana sidecar auto-discovers dashboards. SRE debugging guide written. Observability audit completed.

Phases

See child phase notes: list_notes(parent_slug="plan-2026-02-25-platform-observability")

Summary: All 5 phases NOT STARTED.

Decisions Made

Decision	Rationale
User stories and architecture docs come before implementation	Need to know WHO uses the platform before building dashboards.
Start with one service dashboard, then replicate	Prove the pipeline on pal-e-docs first.
Deployment protection is part of observability	pal-e-docs Alembic crash showed need for both detection and prevention.