Understanding teams’ observability needs
As part of the Observability Platform discovery, we want to understand the current situation across Modernisation Platform, Cloud Platform, and other Ministry of Justice teams.
The questions below are prompts for discussion, not completed findings or mandatory requirements. Teams can contribute even if they only have answers to some of them.
Existing tools and ways of working
- Which tools and services do you use, and which environments do they cover?
- Which logs, metrics, and traces do you collect or access?
- What works well that a future approach should preserve?
- Where do you experience gaps, duplication, or difficulty connecting information?
Service health and incident investigation
- How do you know whether your service is healthy?
- Which dashboards and alerts are useful, and which create noise?
- How do you investigate an incident and connect signals across systems?
- What makes it difficult to find the information you need?
Ownership and operational effort
- Who maintains your tooling, dashboards, collection configuration, and alerts?
- How much effort goes into upgrades, access management, and routine maintenance?
- Where do teams need help, documentation, or specialist knowledge?
- What constraints affect the sustainability or cost of your current approach?
Access, data handling, and integration
- Who needs access, and how should access be separated between teams or environments?
- What data classification, retention, residency, or other security requirements need consideration?
- Which existing identity, notification, incident management, and deployment workflows need integration?
- Are there environment or connectivity constraints a future solution would need to accommodate?
Shared needs and differences
We want to understand where shared capabilities could reduce effort, as well as where teams have different requirements. Discovery should not assume that every team needs the same tools or must replace approaches that work well.
These discussions will inform the capabilities being explored; they do not commit teams to a migration.
Share your experience
Contact #ask-observability-platform with a short description of your current setup, what works, and your main challenges. You do not need a proposed solution or a complete inventory to start a conversation.
Do not include credentials or sensitive operational data in public documentation. Ask the team about an appropriate way to discuss restricted information.