Observability & Instrumentation
|> See what the BEAM is actually doing in production.
/ / Who this is for
- |> Teams flying blind in production: no dashboards, no alerting, log-based debugging only
- |> Engineering leads who want to reduce mean time to recovery and improve on-call quality of life
- |> Companies moving toward SOC 2 that need audit evidence for system monitoring
- |> Teams who have metrics but whose dashboards are unused because the signal-to-noise ratio is too low
/ / What's included
- |>Telemetry instrumentation audit: what you have and what's missing
- |>OpenTelemetry setup: tracing, metrics, and log correlation
- |>Structured logging with request IDs, user IDs, and business-domain context
- |>BEAM VM metrics: process counts, scheduler utilisation, GC, memory by type
- |>Dashboards: per-service latency, error rates, queue depths, VM health
- |>Alerting rules tuned to your traffic patterns with on-call runbooks
/ / How we work
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1
Instrumentation audit
We review your current logging, metrics, and tracing setup and identify the gaps that actually matter for your workload.
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2
Build
We add Telemetry handlers, OpenTelemetry exporters, and structured logging across your codebase, and verify the data is reaching your backend cleanly.
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3
Dashboards & alerts
We build the dashboards and alerting rules, test them against real traffic, and document them so your team can maintain and extend them.
/ / Common questions
- We already use Datadog. Can you instrument specifically for Datadog?
- Yes. We can export OpenTelemetry data to Datadog or use the Datadog APM agent directly. We're familiar with Datadog's Elixir integration and its quirks.
- What is the difference between Telemetry and OpenTelemetry?
- Elixir Telemetry is the built-in event bus that Phoenix, Ecto, and most BEAM libraries already emit events to. OpenTelemetry is the vendor-neutral standard for traces, metrics, and logs. We typically use Telemetry as the event source and OpenTelemetry as the export layer to your backend of choice.
- Will adding instrumentation slow down our application?
- Done correctly, no. Telemetry event dispatch is synchronous but extremely fast. Exporting is asynchronous and batched. We profile the overhead as part of the engagement.
- Can you help reduce alert noise? We get paged for things that are not actionable.
- Yes, this is one of the most common starting points. We audit your existing alerts, identify which fire without real impact, tune thresholds to your actual traffic, and add runbooks so that when something fires your on-call engineer knows exactly what to do.