Case Study 03
Building an Observability Center of Excellence
Role: Platform Engineering Leadership
Scope: cross-functional DevOps and reliability enablement
Focus: process design, platform adoption, and repeatable execution
Context
Teams needed consistent support for instrumentation, alerting quality, and operational readiness. Existing patterns were fragmented and often depended on a small set of experts.
Problem
Reliability improvements were difficult to scale because each team solved observability differently. This created uneven incident quality, duplicated effort, and high cognitive overhead for both product and platform engineers.
Approach
- Defined a COE operating model: intake, standards governance, enablement, and platform roadmap.
- Built a golden path workflow: instrument -> tag -> dashboard -> alert -> runbook.
- Created reusable templates and review checkpoints for new services and major changes.
- Established team-level accountability loops with shared reliability KPIs.
ArchitectureFlow
Outcomes
- Higher consistency in telemetry quality and alerting behavior across teams.
- Faster onboarding into production-ready observability practices.
- Reduced reliance on ad-hoc support from central experts.
OutcomePanel
Operational: standardized reliability workflows across org boundaries.
Business: scalable platform execution and leadership visibility.
What I'd Do Differently
I would pair each enablement stream with explicit adoption SLOs from the first quarter to quantify impact and make tradeoffs between platform backlog and team-specific support more transparent.
Artifacts
- COE operating model map and governance cadence
- Golden-path checklist and service launch rubric
- Standardized runbook template with ownership metadata
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