The Instrumentation Budget Per New Service

Every new service has an observability budget. The expected metrics, logs, traces, and the launch gate.

Default budget

20 metrics per service: 5 of golden signals, 15 of business metrics. More requires justification.

Log volume: 100GB/month default. Higher requires capacity planning.

Launch gate

Service cannot launch without: golden-signal metrics, error logs, distributed tracing for entry points.

Deviation requires explicit waiver. Most don't bother and just instrument properly.

Why this matters

Without policy, services launch under-instrumented. Day-1 incidents are debug-blind.

Policy aligns incentives. Engineers instrument to ship, not as an afterthought.