How I Built a Production Observability Stack —...

I used to dismiss monitoring as something you bolt on after the real engineering is done. Logs were noise. Metrics were "a later problem." Alerts were for teams with dedicated SREs, not a small startup running three service types on Render. I was wrong. Badly wrong. And it took a self-inflicted incident — where my own monitoring system became the thing that needed monitoring — to understand why observability is engineering, not afterthought. This is a detailed account of building our observabili