What Are the Four Golden Signals?

The four golden signals are latency, traffic, errors, and saturation, popularized as the core metrics to monitor for any user-facing service. Watched together, they answer how slow, how busy, how broken, and how full a service is. They give broad coverage of health from a small, focused set rather than a sprawl of dashboards.

Why it matters

Teams often drown in metrics yet miss the ones that matter. Starting from the four golden signals provides high-value coverage with minimal noise, a strong default for service monitoring.

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