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 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

service-mesh-observability