Symptoms vs Causes

Cause-based alerts (CPU above 80%) are noisy because they fire before user impact.

Symptom-based alerts (latency above 1s) fire when users are affected. Symptom alerts are rarer; cause alerts are common. The platform should page on symptoms, ticket on causes.

What it is

A precise definition of symptoms vs causes, scoped to production operations.

Why a sysadmin cares

Production framing. The operational pain this concept addresses, or the incident class it prevents.

How it works

The mental model.

How to configure it

# Configuration snippet illustrating the lesson topic
example_setting: value

How to validate it

promtool check config /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml

How it can fail

The high-frequency failure modes:

1. Silent misconfiguration.
2. Crash on load.
3. Performance regression.
4. Permissions failure.
5. Schema / version drift.

How to troubleshoot it

The diagnostic order:

1. Was it working before?
2. What does the service’s view say?
3. What does the platform’s view say?
4. Form hypothesis, find evidence, test, validate.

Security implications

Symptoms vs Causes 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 changes in a non-production environment.
• Document operational defaults in the team’s instrumentation guide.

Verification

You should now be able to answer:

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

Quiz