Observability · Coverage Check

Observability Coverage Check

Ten questions, five minutes, one score. The Coverage Check tells you where your observability is working, where it is thin, and what to look at first. It does not estimate cost and it does not compare you to anyone.

1How many monitoring or observability tools are in active use across the organisation?One platformTwoThreeFour or more

2Can a single user request be followed end to end, across every service it touches?Yes, for most servicesFor some servicesRarelyNo

3What share of your business critical services have full depth instrumentation?Most of themAbout halfA fewWe are not sure

4Were the coverage tiers, what gets full depth and what gets basic health, decided deliberately?Yes, by designPartlyNo, they are defaults

5How are logs ingested into the platform?Chosen against a known questionA mix of chosen and everythingEverything that could be sent

6How is log retention decided?Matched to the question each log answersA single blanket periodSet to the maximum by default

7Are logs linked to traces and topology?Yes, generallyFor some sourcesNo, logs sit on their own

8When an incident starts, how long does it typically take to identify the owning team?MinutesUnder an hourA few hoursLonger

9How long does it typically take to identify a root cause?MinutesUnder an hourA few hoursLonger

10Was your last major incident diagnosed from the platform, or from people?From the platformA mixFrom people and meetings

Questions

Frequently asked questions

What does the Coverage Check measure?

Three things: how much of the estate is instrumented and how deeply (Coverage), whether telemetry is linked to topology and business meaning (Context), and how quickly incidents get from symptom to root cause (Cause). It returns a score for each and an overall band.

Does it estimate what observability should cost?

No. The Coverage Check assesses design and outcome, not spend. Cost depends on decisions the check helps you make, and any estimate before those decisions would be a guess.

Is the result confidential?

Yes. The result is shown on screen and only sent by email if you ask for it.

Start with a sense check

An hour with the practice, no slides, no obligation. Bring your incident history and your tooling list. Leave with a plain view of where your observability is working, where it is not, and what to do first.

Book an observability sense check