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Engineering

Instrumenting your SaaS on day one (without going overboard)

Observability is not a phase. Here's the minimum viable instrumentation we wire into every SaaS we ship — and what we deliberately leave out.

Primeline TeamDecember 8, 20257 min read

Day-one instrumentation, in order

Errors. Sentry on the client and server. Source maps. Release tagging. Alert routing to a single channel.
Logs. Structured JSON, single ingestor, request-correlated. Drop-in Pino + Axiom or Datadog.
Web vitals. Real-user CLS / LCP / INP. You don't get to claim "fast" without these.
Product analytics. PostHog or Segment, with funnels for the activation moments only.
Synthetic checks. One uptime monitor per critical user journey. That's it.

Day-one anti-instrumentation

Tracing — only when you have something to trace
Custom dashboards — vendor defaults are fine for a quarter
SLOs you can't act on — wait until the team has the muscle

Instrumentation is a tool to make decisions, not a checklist. Wire enough to know when you're broken and what users actually do. The rest can wait.

ObservabilitySaaSEngineering

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