Observability Advisory
A clear path from where you are today to a mature, effective observability practice.
- Maturity model assessments
- Tool rationalization (vendor-neutral)
- Alert fatigue reduction
- SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets
Vendor-neutral • Business-aligned • Practical execution
Observability Engineering for Complex Systems
Barlow Engineering helps organizations transform fragmented monitoring into clear, business-aligned observability. We provide advisory services, architecture guidance, and hands-on engineering to reduce alert fatigue, improve reliability, and make system behavior understandable to both engineers and business leaders.
With more than 30 years of experience operating and designing systems at small and large scale, we focus on outcomes: fewer incidents, faster resolution, and telemetry that clearly reflects business impact.
Maturity assessments
Platform modernization
Signal quality & SLOs
Hands-on implementation
When observability is working, teams can answer:
- What business service is impacted?
- Who owns the problem?
- How severe is the incident?
- What changed, and where?
- How can I be warned when this happens elsewhere?
- What is the benefit if we feed enriched data to AI Ops?
- How can we guess this will happen in the future?
If those questions are hard to answer today, we can help you close the gap quickly and sustainably.
See services →What We Do
Strip the tribal knowledge and brute force out of the decision process. Modern systems produce metrics, logs and traces at enormous volume — yet many organizations still struggle to connect telemetry to business impact. Barlow Engineering bridges the gap between technical signals and operational clarity.
Hands-on Engineering
We design and implement the platform changes needed to make observability real, reliable, and scalable.
- Pipeline design (metrics/logs/traces)
- Agent standardization
- Metadata & labeling strategy
- Migrations and consolidation
Contract & Fractional Engagements
Embedded expertise when you need momentum without long ramp-up.
- Short-term architecture leadership
- Incident-driven remediation
- Enablement and knowledge transfer
- Platform ownership handoff
Need a quick assessment?
Get an outside, senior perspective on your current observability posture and the next best steps.
Monitoring 2.0
Monitoring 2.0 is our tool-agnostic approach to observability configuration and governance — a centralized source of truth that connects infrastructure, applications, and business context.
Business-aligned labels everywhere
Apply consistent business labels to telemetry so dashboards and alerts clearly describe impact.
- Business unit, application, service tier
- Environment, region/datacenter
- Ownership / assignment groups
Consistency across tools
Avoid ad-hoc agent configs and divergent monitoring practices across teams. Monitoring 2.0 keeps collection and labeling consistent — regardless of vendor.
Learn more →Why Barlow Engineering
Strategy and execution from one place — no layers, no handoffs, no generic playbooks.
30+ years of experience
Deep operational and engineering background across multiple eras of infrastructure and tooling.
Outcome-focused
We prioritize signal quality, incident reduction, and faster diagnosis — not tool vanity metrics.
Vendor-neutral
Recommendations grounded in your goals, constraints, and operating model — not reseller incentives.
Ready to improve your observability?
Tell us what you’re working with and what you want to achieve. We’ll respond promptly.
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