Notes from on-call.

How we build Carbon, what we have learned running it, and what we would tell an engineer holding the pager for the first time.

Engineering Aug 27, 2026 6 min read Why we check every thirty seconds Most monitors check every three to five minutes. That interval was chosen for the monitor's budget, not for yours. Here is what the extra checks actually buy. Priya Natarajan

p95 response time · api p95 184 ms

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Incidents Aug 12, 2026 5 min read Writing a status update at 3am The best incident communication we have seen came from people who had a template, a rule about timing, and permission to say 'we do not know yet'. Tomás Ferreira
Engineering Jul 30, 2026 7 min read Logs without sampling Sampling was a storage decision dressed up as a feature. Here is how we index every line and still answer a query over a month of logs in under a second. Priya Natarajan
Guides Jul 15, 2026 5 min read What an SLO is, really Service level objectives get explained with maths. They are easier to understand as a decision about who gets paged, and when. Tomás Ferreira