5 — Distributed Tracing

Site Reliability Engineering: From Foundations to Internet-Scale Systems

The complete 184-chapter, 15-part Site Reliability Engineering curriculum — from Linux internals and distributed-systems theory through reliability engineering, observability, incident response, platform engineering, and Staff/Principal-level MAANG interview preparation, ordered the way SRE expertise actually develops rather than as a topic index.

1 — Observability Foundations

The distinction between monitoring known failure modes and observability — being able to ask new questions of a system you didn't instrument in advance for that exact question.

10 — Grafana

Turning raw telemetry into a dashboard that actually answers 'is this system healthy' at a glance instead of requiring someone to already know what's wrong.

11 — Loki

Index-light, label-based log aggregation built to pair with Prometheus's label model — and the trade-off it makes against full-text search to get there.

12 — Tempo

Object-storage-backed trace storage designed for the exemplar-driven workflow — jump from a metric spike straight to the trace that explains it.