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DevOps & Automation · Foundational

Four Golden Signals

The four key metrics Google SRE recommends monitoring for any user-facing system: latency, traffic, errors, and saturation.

Definition

Latency is the time to serve requests (separating successful from failed), traffic is demand on the system, errors are the rate of failed requests, and saturation is how full the most constrained resource is. Monitoring these covers most user-visible problems.

Example

A dashboard shows p99 latency, requests per second, 5xx rate, and CPU utilization for the API tier.

Exam tip

Memorize all four; saturation is the one most often forgotten or confused with utilization.

Related terms