How to Configure Golden Signals
The four golden signals — latency, traffic, errors, and saturation — are the most important metrics for understanding service health. Nova automatically computes these for every instrumented service, but you can customize thresholds and alerting.
The Four Golden Signals
- Latency — how long it takes to serve a request (P50, P95, P99)
- Traffic — requests per second your service handles
- Errors — the rate of failed requests (5xx, timeouts, exceptions)
- Saturation — how full your resources are (CPU, memory, disk, connections)
Steps
Navigate to Golden Signals
Go to Observability > Golden Signals. You will see a grid of all your services with their current signal status (green, yellow, red).
Select a service
Click on any service to see its detailed golden signals dashboard. Each signal has a time-series chart and current value.
Customize thresholds
Click Edit Thresholds to set custom warning and critical values for each signal. For example:
- Latency P99 warning at 500ms, critical at 2s
- Error rate warning at 1%, critical at 5%
- CPU saturation warning at 70%, critical at 90%
Enable AI baselines
Toggle AI Baselines to let Nova learn your normal patterns and alert on anomalies instead of static thresholds. This is especially useful for traffic signals that vary by time of day.
Add the Golden Signals widget to your team dashboard for an at-a-glance view of all services. Go to Dashboard Studio and drag in the "Golden Signals Grid" widget.
Set up alerts for signal degradation
Create alerts that fire when any golden signal crosses its threshold. Navigate to Alerts > Create and select Golden Signal as the source.
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