APM Tagging Overhaul
Cutting MTTD by 38% through service maps and SLIs aligned to business KPIs
Results at a Glance
The Challenge
A financial services company was struggling with their existing APM implementation, facing critical observability challenges:
- Inconsistent tagging: Fragmented tagging strategy across 200+ microservices made it impossible to correlate issues effectively
- Poor service visibility: No clear service maps or dependency understanding, making troubleshooting extremely difficult
- Misaligned metrics: Technical metrics weren't connected to business outcomes, making prioritization challenging
- Long MTTD: Average mean time to detection was 45+ minutes due to noise and poor signal correlation
Our Solution
Unified Tagging Strategy
Implemented a comprehensive, standardized tagging framework across all services and infrastructure.
- • Business domain classification
- • Environment and deployment tags
- • Owner and team responsibility
- • Service tier and criticality levels
Service Maps & Dependencies
Created comprehensive service maps showing real-time dependencies and data flow.
- • Automatic dependency discovery
- • Real-time service topology
- • Impact analysis visualization
- • Blast radius calculations
Business-Aligned SLIs
Developed Service Level Indicators that directly correlate to business KPIs and customer experience.
- • Customer journey success rates
- • Transaction processing latency
- • API availability by business function
- • Revenue-impacting error rates
Intelligent Dashboards
Custom dashboards providing actionable insights for different stakeholders.
- • Executive business impact views
- • Team-specific service health
- • Real-time incident dashboards
- • Capacity planning insights
Implementation Process
Phase 1: Discovery & Assessment
Comprehensive audit of existing services, dependencies, and business criticality mapping
Phase 2: Tagging Framework Design
Development of standardized tagging taxonomy and implementation guidelines
Phase 3: Gradual Migration
Rolling deployment of new tagging strategy across critical services first
Phase 4: SLI Development
Creation of business-aligned SLIs and corresponding dashboards
Phase 5: Training & Adoption
Team training and documentation for ongoing maintenance and expansion
Tagging Framework Structure
Business Tags
Technical Tags
Business-Aligned SLI Examples
Payment Processing Success Rate
SLI Definition
Percentage of payment transactions completed successfully within 5 seconds, excluding user errors
Business Impact
Directly correlates to revenue loss and customer satisfaction. 1% degradation = $50K daily impact
Account Login Experience
SLI Definition
95th percentile response time for successful authentication flows across web and mobile
Business Impact
Customer retention metric. Slow logins increase churn rate by 15% within 30 days
Detailed Results
Operational Improvements
Business Impact
"The transformation in our observability has been game-changing. We now have complete visibility into how our technical performance impacts business outcomes. When issues arise, we know exactly what's affected and can prioritize based on real business impact."
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