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# Three Metrics That Would Have Caught My Incidents
- URL: https://debugly.dev/three-metrics-that-catch-incidents/
- Published: 2026-01-06T09:15:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T09:13:07.000Z
- Description: Not a guide to observability platforms. Just the three signals that, in retrospect, would have given me warning before nearly everything that went wrong.
- Author: Rohit Bhadani
- Tags: DevOps, Debugging, Engineering Culture, Performance

| Resource        | Saturation signal                                     |
| --------------- | ----------------------------------------------------- |
| CPU             | Run queue length, or Linux pressure stall information |
| Memory          | Page fault rate, swap activity, PSI memory            |
| Disk            | I/O queue depth, await from iostat                    |
| Connection pool | Requests waiting for a connection, and wait time      |
| Thread pool     | Queue depth                                           |
| HTTP server     | Accept queue backlog                                  |

---

Related reading: [The Memory Leak That Lived in the Metrics Pipeline](https://debugly.dev/prometheus-label-cardinality-memory/) explores a connected angle.

Related reading: [Consumer Lag Is Not a Throughput Problem Until You Prove It Is](https://debugly.dev/kafka-consumer-lag-debugging/) explores a connected angle.

Related reading: [Where Serverless Cold Start Time Actually Goes](https://debugly.dev/serverless-cold-start-breakdown/) explores a connected angle.

Published on [debugly.dev](https://debugly.dev/) by [Rohit Bhadani](https://debugly.dev/about/) | Founder of [Krova Cloud](https://krova.cloud/?ref=debugly.dev)