How to Design a Monitoring Strategy for Growing Teams

The Growth Challenge

Monitoring that works for a 3-person team breaks down at 30 people:

At 3 people:

• Everyone knows all the services
• Alerts go to everyone
• Tribal knowledge handles incidents

At 30 people:

• No one knows everything
• Alert routing becomes critical
• Process and documentation become essential

A growing team needs a monitoring strategy, not just monitoring tools.

Building Blocks of Monitoring Strategy

1. Define What Matters

Before tools, define your monitoring goals:

User-facing health:

• Are users able to use the product?
• Are they experiencing acceptable performance?
• Are errors affecting user workflows?

Operational health:

• Are systems running within capacity?
• Are there early warning signs of problems?
• Can we deploy safely?

Business health:

• Are business-critical flows working?
• Are SLAs being met?
• Are we trending in the right direction?

2. Establish Monitoring Tiers

Not all services need the same monitoring depth.

Tier 1: Critical Path

• User-facing services
• Payment processing
• Authentication
• Core business logic

Monitoring: Full observability (metrics, logs, traces), 24/7 alerting, fast response SLA

Tier 2: Supporting Services

• Internal APIs
• Background workers
• Caches and queues

Monitoring: Metrics and key logs, business-hours alerting, moderate response SLA

Tier 3: Non-Critical

• Development tools
• Internal dashboards
• Batch processing

Monitoring: Basic uptime, email alerts, best-effort response

3. Standardize the Basics

Every service, regardless of tier, should have baseline monitoring:

The Golden Signals (from Google SRE):

1. Latency: How long requests take
2. Traffic: How much demand exists
3. Errors: Rate of failed requests
4. Saturation: How full resources are

If every service exposes these, you have consistent visibility across the organization.

Monitoring Strategy by Team Size

5-15 People: Foundation Phase

Goals:

• Establish monitoring culture
• Define ownership
• Build initial runbooks

Actions:

1. Choose one monitoring platform

   • Avoid tool sprawl early
   • Single source of truth
   • Easier onboarding

2. Define on-call rotation

   • Even with small team, formalize response
   • Prevents "everyone responds to everything"
   • Builds sustainable habits

3. Write basic runbooks

   • For each alert: what does it mean, what to do
   • Start simple, improve over time
   • Living documents, not perfect documents

4. Establish dashboards

   • One overview dashboard everyone uses
   • Service-specific dashboards for deep dives
   • Avoid dashboard sprawl

15-50 People: Scaling Phase

Goals:

• Decentralize ownership
• Improve signal-to-noise
• Build sustainable practices

Actions:

1. Assign service ownership

   • Each service has a responsible team
   • Team owns monitoring for their services
   • Clear escalation paths

2. Implement SLOs

   • Define Service Level Objectives
   • Alert on SLO burn rate, not arbitrary thresholds
   • Focus on user experience, not system metrics

3. Improve alert routing

   • Alerts go to owning team
   • On-call rotation per team
   • Reduce noise for non-owning teams

4. Create monitoring standards

   • Required metrics for all services
   • Naming conventions
   • Dashboard templates
   • Alert structure guidelines

5. Regular review cadence

   • Weekly: review incidents
   • Monthly: review alert effectiveness
   • Quarterly: review monitoring strategy

50+ People: Platform Phase

Goals:

• Self-service monitoring
• Platform team support
• Organization-wide visibility

Actions:

1. Build monitoring platform team

   • Maintains monitoring infrastructure
   • Provides tools and guidance
   • Doesn't own all monitoring—enables teams

2. Create self-service capabilities

   • Templates for common monitoring
   • Easy dashboard creation
   • Automated alert setup

3. Implement organization-wide observability

   • Distributed tracing across services
   • Unified log aggregation
   • Cross-service dependency mapping

4. Governance without bottlenecks

   • Standards that enable, not restrict
   • Review process for significant changes
   • Autonomy within guardrails

Key Decisions for Growing Teams

Centralized vs Decentralized Monitoring

Centralized (platform team runs everything):

• Consistent implementation
• Efficient resource use
• Can become bottleneck

Decentralized (each team runs their own):

• Team autonomy
• Better fit for specific needs
• Can become fragmented

Hybrid (recommended):

• Shared platform infrastructure
• Teams own their service monitoring
• Standards enable consistency

Build vs Buy

Build (self-hosted open source):

• Full control
• Lower license cost
• Higher operational cost

Buy (SaaS monitoring):

• Faster start
• Lower operational burden
• Per-seat/per-host costs scale

Decision factors:

• Team ops capacity
• Growth rate
• Budget model
• Security requirements

Single Tool vs Best-of-Breed

Single platform (Datadog, New Relic):

• Unified experience
• Automatic correlation
• Vendor lock-in, higher cost

Best-of-breed (Prometheus + ELK + Jaeger):

• Flexibility
• Lower cost at scale
• Integration complexity

Recommendation: Start with a single platform. Add specialized tools only when you hit clear limitations.

Implementing Change

Don't Boil the Ocean

Improving monitoring strategy is ongoing work:

Quarter 1: Standardize golden signals Quarter 2: Implement SLOs for critical services Quarter 3: Improve alert routing Quarter 4: Add distributed tracing

Small, consistent improvements beat big-bang transformations.

Get Buy-In

Monitoring strategy affects everyone. Involve:

• Engineering leadership: Prioritization and resources
• Team leads: Implementation and adoption
• On-call engineers: Practical feedback

Measure Progress

Track monitoring maturity:

• MTTD: Mean time to detect issues
• MTTR: Mean time to resolve
• Alert noise: False positive rate
• Coverage: % of services with adequate monitoring
• Adoption: Teams actively using monitoring

Common Mistakes

Over-Engineering Early

You don't need:

• Custom metrics pipeline at 10 services
• Multi-cluster Prometheus at 20 servers
• ML anomaly detection at startup stage

Start simple. Add complexity when you feel specific pain.

Under-Investing During Growth

Warning signs you're under-investing:

• Incidents take hours to detect
• Same alerts fire repeatedly without action
• New team members can't understand monitoring
• No one knows who owns what

Ignoring Culture

Tools don't create monitoring culture. Address:

• Do teams feel responsible for reliability?
• Are incidents treated as learning opportunities?
• Is on-call sustainable and supported?

Monitoring Strategy Checklist

Foundation (Every Team Needs)

• Single monitoring platform (or deliberate tool choices)
• Service ownership defined
• Basic on-call rotation
• Runbooks for critical alerts
• Overview dashboard

Growth (Teams 15+)

• SLOs for critical services
• Team-based alert routing
• Monitoring standards documented
• Regular incident review
• Alert effectiveness tracking

Scale (Teams 50+)

• Platform team or owner
• Self-service monitoring capabilities
• Cross-service observability
• Monitoring governance process
• Capacity planning from metrics

Summary

Monitoring strategy for growing teams requires intentional evolution:

Foundation (5-15 people):

• Establish basics and ownership
• Build habits before scale forces them

Scaling (15-50 people):

• Decentralize ownership
• Implement SLOs
• Reduce noise, improve routing

Platform (50+ people):

• Self-service capabilities
• Organization-wide observability
• Governance without bottlenecks

Key principles:

• Start simple, add complexity with need
• Standardize basics, allow flexibility on top
• Measure and improve continuously
• Culture matters as much as tools

The goal isn't perfect monitoring—it's monitoring that helps your team ship reliable software without burning out. Build the strategy that serves that goal at your current scale, and evolve as you grow.