Lab · 02 · Self-assessment · 14 questions

Where you're at, in about three minutes.

Fourteen evidence-based questions across the seven dimensions of the formal Tracefox assessment. Answer honestly, including the ones you'd rather not. Score yourself the way an external assessor would: on what's actually in production, not on what's planned for next quarter.

Yes · 4

In place, consistently used, evidenced.

Partial · 2

Some teams or services. Inconsistent.

No · 0

Absent or aspirational only.

Don't know

Honest answer. Excluded from the score; counted separately.

Question 1
01

Telemetry coverage

Are logs from infrastructure, application, and platform layers collected centrally and searchable?

Question 2
02

Telemetry coverage

Is OpenTelemetry deployed as your instrumentation layer, rather than vendor-specific agents only?

Question 3
03

Alerting quality

Are alerts defined on user-facing symptoms (latency, errors) rather than on resource causes (CPU, memory)?

Question 4
04

Alerting quality

Does every production alert have a linked runbook and a named team owner?

Question 5
05

Incident response

Is there a documented Incident Commander role used during major incidents, with trained rotation?

Question 6
06

Incident response

Do you run blameless post-incident reviews with action items tracked to completion?

Question 7
07

SLO maturity

Are SLOs defined for your most critical user journeys and agreed with the business, rather than set by engineering alone?

Question 8
08

SLO maturity

Is there a written error-budget policy that decides what happens when the budget is exhausted?

Question 9
09

Correlation & RCA

Can engineers pivot from a metric anomaly to related logs and traces without manually switching tools?

Question 10
10

Correlation & RCA

Are trace IDs propagated through your stack and injected into structured logs?

Question 11
11

Tooling & IaC

Are dashboards, alerts, and observability config managed as code (Terraform, CDK, Jsonnet)?

Question 12
12

Tooling & IaC

Is your instrumentation layer vendor-neutral? Could you swap backends without re-instrumenting?

Question 13
13

Platform & culture

Do product/squad teams own their own observability, rather than it being centralised in an ops team?

Question 14
14

Platform & culture

Is observability instrumentation part of your Definition of Done for new features?

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