Maple field manual
Guides for production engineers.
Plain-English foundations and hands-on investigations for engineers running production software. Start with APM, then read about observability, OpenTelemetry, and the signals you debug with.
02 · Foundations
Build the mental model
Read in any order. Each guide answers one question and none of them assume a vendor or stack.
What is observability?
Understand traces, logs, and metrics, and why correlation matters more than collecting each signal in isolation.
What is OpenTelemetry?
Learn how vendor-neutral instrumentation keeps telemetry portable across languages, collectors, and backends.
Best open-source observability tools
Compare the leading open-source options by architecture, signals, license, operating cost, and best fit.
What is Apdex?
How Apdex turns response times into one satisfaction score, how to pick its target T, and when it beats a p95 alert.
Uptime monitoring with traces and HTTP checks
Alert on error rate, throughput and Apdex from the traces you already send, add Collector HTTP checks for endpoints and certificates, and see which failures each one catches.