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Field notes from the on-call

Engineering deep-dives, incident retros and observability practice from the Helix team.

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Topics All posts 241 Engineering Incident retros Product Tutorials Practice Culture
All articles // 61 posts · newest first
15 May
FIELD NOTES FROM THE ON-CALL

The cost of a curious query: your observability bill explained

Observability bills feel mysterious until you learn the three levers behind every one of them: how much you ingest, how long you...

Tomás Rivera May 15 2026 2 min
14 May
INCIDENT

What Carrying the Pager for a Year Taught Me About Writing Better Alerts

I've written alerts as an author for years. Only after a year of being woken up by other people's alerts did I understand what...

Priya Raman May 14 2026 3 min
08 May
FIELD NOTES FROM THE ON-CALL

Instrumenting a monolith without slowing it down

You do not have to rewrite the monolith to see inside it. You do have to be careful, because a naive span on a hot path can cost...

Lena Park May 8 2026 2 min
07 May
INCIDENT

Three False Alarms and One Real Fire: A Friday Night On-Call Log

Four pages in six hours. Three were nothing. The fourth was the reason the other three almost got ignored.

Priya Raman May 7 2026 3 min
01 May
FIELD NOTES FROM THE ON-CALL

What OpenTelemetry gets right, and where it bites

OpenTelemetry is the right long-term bet and an occasionally sharp short-term tool. After two years in production, here is where...

Arjun Mehta May 1 2026 2 min
30 Apr
INCIDENT

The Day a Rollout Evicted Half Our On-Call Runbook

A routine node pool upgrade evicted pods faster than our disruption budget accounted for, and three runbook commands stopped...

Marco Vidal Apr 30 2026 2 min
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