https://bala-krishnan.com/tags/observability/Recent content in Observability on HomeHugo -- gohugo.ioenThu, 29 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://bala-krishnan.com/posts/28-histograms-vs-averages/Thu, 29 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://bala-krishnan.com/posts/28-histograms-vs-averages/Warren Buffett famously used to buy his breakfast at the same McDonald’s in Omaha on his way to work. Forbes puts his net worth at about $148 billion. Imagine he walks in one morning and joins 49 other people having breakfast. Say each of them has the net worth of a typical American household, about $193,000 (the Federal Reserve’s most recent survey). What’s the average net worth of the people in that McDonald’s?https://bala-krishnan.com/posts/27-probe/Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://bala-krishnan.com/posts/27-probe/I wanted to know a simple thing: how long does this blog take to load? It turns out that’s a harder question to answer than I expected, mostly because there isn’t really a server to ask. This site is built with Hugo and deployed as a static site on Render, which serves it through Cloudflare. I don’t run anything. There’s no process I can add metrics to, no access log I can read, no /metrics endpoint.https://bala-krishnan.com/posts/26-lamplighter/Fri, 23 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://bala-krishnan.com/posts/26-lamplighter/When something breaks in production, the first ten minutes usually look the same. One terminal tailing the API pod. Another tailing the worker. A third running kubectl get events -w. Maybe a fourth on the ingress controller, if you can remember which namespace it lives in and what its labels are. Then you start flipping between them, trying to work out what happened first. That last part is the actual job, and none of the tools help with it.