Which artifact would you configure to notify engineers about latency or error spikes?

Which artifact would you configure to notify engineers about latency or error spikes?

• A. Logs
• B. Metrics
• C. Traces
• D. Alerts

Answer: (D)

Alerts are used to notify engineers when observed conditions exceed thresholds, such as latency or error spikes. You set alert rules based on metrics like latency percentiles (e.g., P95 or P99) and error rates; when those conditions are met, the alert fires and is routed to the on-call team through notification channels like email, PagerDuty, or Slack. This is different from logs (text records of events), metrics (numeric measurements over time), or traces (the path of a single request across services). By configuring alerts on the relevant metrics, you get timely notifications when performance degrades.

Alerts are used to notify engineers when observed conditions exceed thresholds, such as latency or error spikes. You set alert rules based on metrics like latency percentiles (e.g., P95 or P99) and error rates; when those conditions are met, the alert fires and is routed to the on-call team through notification channels like email, PagerDuty, or Slack. This is different from logs (text records of events), metrics (numeric measurements over time), or traces (the path of a single request across services). By configuring alerts on the relevant metrics, you get timely notifications when performance degrades.