Kickstarting 2026: The Ultimate Observability Audit Checklist

Welcome to 2026! The traffic from the holidays has subsided. The code freeze is over. Now is the perfect time to do some “Spring Cleaning” (in January) for your observability stack.

Monitoring entropy is real. Over a year, we accumulate alerts that no one reads and dashboards that no one looks at. Here is your Audit Checklist to start the year fresh.

1. Purge “Zombie Alerts”

Go through your PagerDuty/Slack history. Find alerts that fired >10 times last month but resulted in Zero Action.

• Example: “CPU High on Worker Node” (But auto-scaling handled it).
• Action: Delete it. If it doesn’t require human intervention, it shouldn’t hold a human hostage.

2. Identify “Blind Spots”

Look at your Incident Post-Mortems from 2025. Was there an outage you didn’t catch?

• Scenario: Users reported “Checkout is stuck,” but all your API monitors were Green.
• Gap: Front-end JavaScript errors? Third-party payment gateway failure?
• Action: Add a Synthetic Transaction monitor for the full Checkout flow.

3. FinOps Review (Cost Audit)

Are you paying for data you don’t need?

• Logs: Are you logging INFO level debug data to Splunk/Datadog? Switch to WARN or ERROR for production.
• Metrics: Are you collecting high-cardinality metrics (e.g., user_id as a label)? This is the #1 cause of ballooning bills.

4. Verify Contact Details

Who is “On-Call”?

• Check your escalation policies.
• Are ex-employees still in the rotation?
• Is the SMS number for the CTO correct? Run a “Fire Drill” to ensure the notification pipeline works.

5. Upgrade Your Tools

Are you still running Prometheus v2.30? Cluster Uptime v1.0? Security patches and performance improvements are waiting. Schedule a maintenance window this week to upgrade your monitoring agents.

Goal for 2026: Fewer Alerts, Higher Signal.