Why green dashboards can hide broken customer experiences

Short summary

An engineer recounts an incident where all infrastructure dashboards showed green while customers couldn't place orders or complete payments. The lesson: monitoring CPU, memory, and latency tells you if servers are alive, but not if customers can succeed. The team shifted to monitoring complete user journeys—signup, checkout, password reset—as business metrics that reveal problems infrastructure dashboards miss.

• •Infrastructure dashboards can be green while customers experience critical failures
• •Shift from 'is the system healthy?' to 'can a customer complete their task?'
• •Monitor full user journeys as business metrics, not just isolated service metrics

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.