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RunBook Academy

ObservabilityCI · Missing TracesMissingTraces

Instrumentation Not Running

Intermediate⏱ ~22 minbash

What you'll learn

  • Explain the topic in production terms
  • Configure and operate the topic in a production observability stack
  • Recognise and diagnose the most common failure modes
  • Apply the discipline to a real environment

Prerequisites

Verified against Prometheus 2.55.x · Alertmanager 0.28.x · node_exporter 1.8.x · blackbox_exporter 0.26.x · Grafana 11.x · Loki 3.x · Tempo current · OpenTelemetry Collector 0.110.x · Grafana Alloy current · Docker Engine 28.x · Ubuntu 24.04 LTS · Debian 12 (Bookworm) · RHEL / Rocky / AlmaLinux 9.x · 2026-08-13

Not yet marked complete on this device.

The service may be missing the SDK.

What it is

A precise definition scoped to production operations.

Why a sysadmin cares

Production framing.

How it works

The mental model.

example_setting: value

How to configure it

Real configuration examples with annotated options.

promtool check config /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml

How to validate it

Commands the operator runs to confirm the configuration is live and correct.

How it can fail

Failure modes: silent misconfiguration, crash on load, performance regression, permissions failure, schema / version drift.

How to troubleshoot it

Diagnostic order: was it working before? what does the service view say? what does the platform view say? form hypothesis, find evidence, test, validate.

Security implications

The topic has security implications wherever the relevant component exposes an HTTP endpoint, an authentication layer, or a credential.

Performance implications

Performance implications come from cardinality, scrape / push interval, rule size, retention, and query cost.

Production guidance

  • Validate before applying.
  • Test in non-production.

Verification

  • What is the topic in production terms?
  • Why does a sysadmin care about it?
  • How does it fail and how do you diagnose the failure?

Quiz

Knowledge check · 8 questions

  1. Q1. What is the primary purpose of instrumentation not running?

  2. Q2. Which failure mode of instrumentation not running is most operationally costly?

  3. Q3. Production verification should run on production hosts.

  4. Q4. First response when instrumentation not running misbehaves?

  5. Q5. Name one signal that confirms instrumentation not running is healthy.

  6. Q6. Which of these are validation steps?

  7. Q7. Right discipline when changing in production?

  8. Q8. Telemetry usefulness requires:

Passing score: 75%. Answers are checked in this browser.