Start with the business service
Map the application and its dependencies. Choose indicators that help explain whether people can use the service successfully, then add supporting infrastructure signals.
Give every alert an owner
An alert needs a recipient, a reason to act, and a next step. Define severity and escalation so that important signals are visible without treating every threshold as an emergency.
Keep dashboards understandable
Organize views around questions: what is affected, when did it start, and which dependency changed? A useful dashboard reduces the effort needed to make a decision.
Review and tune
Review noisy alerts, missed incidents, and recurring trends. Monitoring should change as applications and infrastructure evolve.