Observability

24 articles

nodejs13 min read

What AsyncLocalStorage actually costs, measured

AsyncLocalStorage adds about 250 nanoseconds per request on Node 24 and 26, down from 510 on Node 22. Reading the store costs roughly 25 ns a call. Measured across three versions with the script included.

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ebpf7 min read

eBPF for Backend Engineers — Zero-Instrumentation Observability

eBPF runs sandboxed programs in the Linux kernel to observe traffic and performance without modifying application code. Learn Cilium for network visibility, Hubble for service-to-service flows, Parca for continuous profiling, and bpftrace for ad-hoc investigation.

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backend5 min read

Logging Everything and Nothing Useful — The Noise Problem

Your logs are full. Gigabytes per hour. Health check pings, SQL query text, Redis GET/SET for every cached value. When a real error occurs, it''s buried under 50,000 noise lines. You log everything and still can''t find what you need in a production incident.

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backend4 min read

No Observability Strategy — Flying Blind in Production

Something is wrong in production. Response times spiked. Users are complaining. You SSH into a server and grep logs. You have no metrics, no traces, no dashboards. You''re debugging a distributed system with no instruments — and you will be for hours.

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