The RED Method: How To Instrument Your Services

The RED Method defines three key metrics you should measure for every microservice in your architecture. Inspired by the USE Method from Brendan Gregg, it gives developers a template for instrumenting their services and building dashboards in a consistent, repeatable fashion.

In this talk, we will discuss patterns of application instrumentation, where and when they are applicable, and how they can be implemented with Prometheus. We'll cover Google's Four Golden Signals, the RED Method, the USE Method, and Dye Testing. We'll also discuss why consistency is an important approach for reducing cognitive load. Finally we'll talk about the limitations of these approaches and what can be done to overcome them.