DarDev Services runs a two-week observability kickstart for teams that deploy production software but still debug outages with SSH and grep. You leave with Prometheus scraping your hosts and apps, three alert rules tied to symptoms users feel, one Grafana dashboard checked into git, and runbook links—not a slide deck about three pillars of observability. We sequence metrics before logs and defer Jaeger until microservice boundaries justify the RAM line item, matching the phased approach in logs-metrics-traces.
The engagement fits MENA scale-ups on OVH VPS, small k3s, or Compose with one engineer pairing four to eight hours per week. DarDev Services is separate from Hesabi (Tunisia-only) and EscaHire (waitlist).
Who should book a kickstart
- You had two or more user-visible outages in the last quarter and MTTR exceeded one hour
- Prometheus or Grafana exists but nobody trusts alerts—or alerts do not exist
- Engineers grep docker logs across hosts during every incident review
- You are about to split a monolith and need baseline metrics before tracing debates
- Leadership asked for an SLO but the team cannot export http_requests_total yet
We pass on hardware-only NOC or greenfield with no production traffic. scoping-devops-engagement covers discovery questions; the kickstart assumes host access and CI basics are already clear.
Week 1: baseline metrics and alerting
Week one maps scrape targets—node_exporter, ingress, database exporters, app /metrics—and adds minimal RED counters if the app exports nothing yet.
- Day 1–2 — access and inventory
Read-only SSH or kubectl, staging parity check, list of services and owners. Document current on-call path and last incident timeline.
- Day 3–4 — Prometheus and exporters
Deploy or harden Prometheus with retention sized to disk budget. Wire scrape configs and service discovery. Validate targets are up before any dashboard work.
- Day 5 — alerts and deploy correlation
Three PromQL rules: elevated 5xx rate, p95 latency breach, disk or memory saturation. Route through Alertmanager to Telegram or SMS—not email on the same SMTP you debug. Annotate Grafana with GitLab deploy events so spikes map to releases.
Dashboard layout follows grafana-dashboards-small-teams: one landing board with golden signals, links into service detail, no forty-panel graveyard. prometheus-metrics-every-saas is the minimum counter set we expect before week one ends.
Week 2: logs, runbooks, and handoff
Week two audits structured logging and, when disk allows, deploys Loki with fourteen-day retention. Tight RAM gets a Phase 2 defer memo with ingestion limits—not an OOM during traffic spikes.
- Day 6–7 — log pipeline or defer memo
Either Loki plus Explore linked from Prometheus panels, or a written deferral with triggers (thirty-minute grep sessions, compliance audit ask) and estimated RAM cost.
- Day 8–9 — runbooks and postmortem template
Each firing alert links to a one-page runbook: symptom, first checks, rollback command, escalation. Drop in the blameless postmortem skeleton from incident-postmortem-culture so the next outage produces a git commit, not a Slack thread.
- Day 10 — handoff and thirty-day roadmap
Live walkthrough with your engineer. Deliver dashboard JSON, alert YAML, and a prioritized backlog: cardinality cleanup, backup monitoring, trace pilot if microservices ship this quarter.
Deliverables you keep
- Prometheus scrape config and retention policy documented in your repo
- Alertmanager routes with at least three production-ready rules
- One Grafana dashboard exported as JSON under version control
- Runbook links embedded in alert annotations
- Written gap analysis: tracing readiness, SLO candidates, disk headroom
- Optional Loki stack with LogQL examples for your top three failure modes
Default stack is open source; observability-on-a-budget sizes RAM on a shared VPS. Budget four to eight hours from one engineer, staging parity, and break-glass read access—the clock starts when kubectl or SSH works.
After the kickstart
Teams often extend with a retainer for Loki or OpenTelemetry; others self-serve from the roadmap. contacting-dardev-services covers CRM routing. Request a kickstart at dardev.net/products with host size, last outage, and current Prometheus status.
Is the engagement exactly ten business days?
We plan two calendar weeks including handoff. Access delays or holiday freezes extend timeline without shortening deliverables—you still get metrics, alerts, dashboard, and roadmap.
We already run Prometheus but alerts never fire correctly—does the kickstart still fit?
Yes. Many engagements start as an alert and dashboard audit: fix label cardinality, replace threshold noise with SLO-style error budgets, and wire Alertmanager to a channel on-call actually reads.
Will you install Datadog or New Relic instead of open source?
Only if you already licensed a vendor and need integration help. Default delivery is Prometheus, Grafana, and optional Loki on your infrastructure so OPEX stays predictable on a Tunis VPS.
Can tracing be included in two weeks?
We assess OpenTelemetry readiness and document a pilot scope. Full Jaeger or Tempo rollout usually follows in a second phase once metrics and logs shorten incidents—tracing without RED metrics wastes disk.
What does it cost compared to a full DevOps retainer?
The kickstart is a fixed-scope SOW—smaller than an open-ended retainer. Exact pricing depends on cluster count and access complexity; discovery call produces a written range before work starts.
How do we start?
Email contact@dardev.net or use dardev.net/products with stack summary, last outage narrative, and VPS or cluster specs. We reply within two business days with fit confirmation or a redirect to Hesabi or DarDevLab when products fit better.
