Project: A Fully Observable Microservice

Building observability into a Rust microservice is no longer optional—it's foundational to production systems. This series walks you through constructing a fully observable platform from the ground up: instrumenting HTTP endpoints with tracing spans, exposing Prometheus metrics, implementing health and readiness probes, adding resilience layers like circuit breakers, and stress-testing the whole system.

Over the course of 10 articles, you'll learn not just the tools (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, tokio), but the architecture behind them—why observability matters, how to structure traces so they tell a coherent story, and how to catch failure modes before they hit production. Each article builds on the previous one, starting with foundational observability patterns and advancing to production troubleshooting techniques.

By the end, you'll have a working Rust service that collects traces, emits metrics, reports health status, survives partial failures, and scales under load. You'll understand how to instrument your own services and debug real-world issues using observability data.

This is the companion project to the Rust: From Zero to Hero curriculum, designed for developers who have completed basic Rust syntax and want to see how professional microservices handle visibility at scale.

Articles in this series​

Articles in this series