Observability Topic

Observability

Observability is not a dashboard. It is the ability to ask new questions about a running system and get useful answers. These posts cover log level discipline, what monitoring is really for, and why structured logging without volume control still leaves you blind at 3am.

Backend

Posted on May 24, 2026

The Kafka Consumer Group That Stopped Consuming

A Kafka consumer group can stop consuming while every metric looks healthy. Rebalance storms, max poll timeouts, stuck partitions, and how to actually diagnose.

Your Logs Are a Pile, Not a System

Log levels exist for a reason. Most codebases ignore the reason, log everything at INFO, then wonder why the logs are useless during an actual incident.

Monitoring Is Not a Dashboard

Real monitoring is not a Grafana dashboard. It is knowing which questions to ask, which signals answer them, and what to do when the answer is unexpected.