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Platform Engineering
Apr 29, 20268 min readDefine KPIs Before Code: Day 1 Metrics for Application and Infrastructure Health
KPI-first design prevents teams from shipping generic metrics that miss real business and platform risk.
day 1 metrics
application KPIs
infrastructure KPIs
observability design
Design first, instrument second
If teams define metrics after coding, they usually settle for default telemetry that says little about product health.
KPI design belongs in architecture and planning documents, not just operations runbooks.
Two KPI layers to define early
Application and infrastructure KPIs solve different questions and should be planned together.
- Application KPIs: workflow success, user latency, business failure rates.
- Infrastructure KPIs: saturation, orchestration health, platform limits.
- Shared SLO boundaries: thresholds that trigger mitigation.
Delivery impact
When KPI definitions are upstream, platform teams can automate instrumentation in the Golden Path before services launch.
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