Stage 6: Mission Operations — Read the Flight Instruments
A passenger reports that booking is slow. “Look at Grafana” is not yet an investigation. We need to choose the evidence that answers the question: a metric for the rate or latency pattern, logs for a discrete event, and a trace for the causal route through services.
Mission Operations builds those signals one at a time before asking you to join them around a booking. This is the stage where an operator learns to move from a symptom to a defensible explanation.
What you will understand
- Signals and metrics
- Discovery and collection
- Queries, alerts, and objectives
- Logs
- Traces
- Correlating a booking
A ServiceMonitor describes scrape discovery; Prometheus performs the scrape. An alert evaluates a condition; it does not repair the system. A trace needs real context propagation before it can explain a real booking.
When to take the controls
The Mission Operations lab is ready when you can choose a signal for a question and name the evidence that it was actually collected. Use the lab to follow a booking across services and test your interpretation.