Observability stack for the bank
Metrics, logs, traces for banking infrastructure. Regulatory requirements + SRE discipline.
Discuss Your ChallengeWhy the bank needs unified observability
Banking operations — ABS, card processing, online banking, payments, ATM, branch — each has its own monitoring. Cross-system incident correlation takes hours.
Regulator increases requirements: incident reporting within hours, MTTR thresholds, availability targets.
Unified observability — three classes (metrics, logs, traces) on a single platform.
Three pillars
Metrics. Throughput, latency p50/p95/p99, error rate. Per service, per channel.
Logs. Structured events, full-text search.
Traces. End-to-end request path across banking systems.
Banking-specific requirements
PII in logs — masked or excluded. Compliance requirement.
Audit retention — long term (>5 years) for regulator.
Critical service identification. Payment, online banking, ATM — different SLO targets.
Regulator-facing reporting. Service availability per quarter.
Structural elements
Collectors (OpenTelemetry).
Pipelines with PII filtering.
Storage tiers (hot/warm/cold).
Unified query layer.
Tuned alerting.
Dashboards per service / per business flow.
SLI/SLO framework.
Where it usually breaks
Each team its own stack — cross-system correlation impossible.
PII in plain logs — security incident.
Sampling aggressive — incident traces missing.
Alerts noisy — critical alerts ignored.
Retention too short — regulator audit fails.
Cost out of control.
Operating model
Owner — Head of SRE.
SRE per critical service.
Service owners (use platform, accountable for SLO).
Routine — weekly SLO review, post-mortem for each significant incident.
Related
- /en/architecture/banking-event-bus-architecture/ — event bus monitoring
- /en/insights/banking-sre-discipline/ — SRE
- /en/architecture/banking-mlops-architecture/ — MLOps observability
- /en/insights/banking-incident-management/ — incident management
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