Hello Reader—
At 3am last Tuesday, alerts started screaming.
“CRITICAL: CPU usage at 95%! Memory at 87%! Disk I/O spiking!”
The platform team scrambled. Emergency scaling. Incident calls. War room activated.
Six hours later, they discovered the truth:
Every single alert was meaningless.
The platform was handling traffic perfectly. Users were happy. Revenue was flowing.
They’d spent £2M building dashboards that tracked everything except what actually mattered.
Here’s what I learned from 50+ platform disasters: The metrics you’re obsessing over are probably the wrong ones.
THE VANITY METRICS EPIDEMIC
After analysing failed platforms, I found a terrifying pattern:
90% of platform teams track metrics that don’t predict problems.
The “standard” dashboard:
- ✅ CPU utilisation (meaningless without context)
- ✅ Memory usage (rarely the real bottleneck)
- ✅ Pod count (vanity metric extraordinaire)
- ✅ Deployment frequency (quantity ≠ quality)
- ✅ Uptime percentage (hides user experience)
What they DON’T track:
- Time to detect real user impact
- Mean time to customer resolution
- Developer velocity (features shipped)
- Business metric correlation
- Actual user experience
That financial services client? Their “99.9% uptime” dashboard showed green while customers couldn’t log in for 3 hours. The login service was “up” - it was just returning errors.
THE 5 METRICS THAT ACTUALLY PREDICT DISASTER
After rescuing 50+ platforms, these 5 numbers tell me everything:
1. Time to Customer Impact Detection
What it measures: How long between a problem starting and you knowing customers are affected Target: Under 2 minutes Why it matters: Infrastructure metrics lie. Customer impact is truth.
2. Developer Deployment Confidence Score
What it measures: % of deployments that happen without fear Target: 90%+ Why it matters: If developers are scared to deploy, your platform is broken
3. Mean Time to Business Resolution
What it measures: Time from customer impact to business problem solved Target: Under 15 minutes Why it matters: Technical fixes don’t matter if customers are still suffering
4. Platform Adoption Velocity
What it measures: % of new services choosing your platform vs. alternatives Target: 80%+ Why it matters: Developers vote with their feet. Low adoption = platform failure
5. Revenue-Correlated Incidents
What it measures: How many alerts actually correlate with revenue drops Target: 90%+ of critical alerts should show business impact Why it matters: If your alerts don’t affect money, they’re noise
REAL STORY: THE DASHBOARD THAT SAVED £5M
E-commerce client. Black Friday approaching. Their dashboard showed:
- ✅ All systems green
- ✅ 99.8% uptime
- ✅ CPU under 60%
- ✅ Memory stable
But their Customer Impact Detection metric was spiking. Checkout completion rate dropped 15%.
Investigation revealed: Payment gateway was responding with 200 OK… but processing 0 transactions.
Traditional monitoring: “Everything’s fine!” Business-focused metrics: “We’re losing £50K/hour!”
They fixed it in 12 minutes. Saved Black Friday. The “perfect” infrastructure metrics would have hidden the disaster until Monday morning.
THE METRIC AUDIT FRAMEWORK
This week, audit your dashboards:
Step 1: The Business Impact Test For each metric, ask: “If this number changes, does revenue change?” If no, delete it.
Step 2: The Action Test
For each alert, ask: “What specific action does this trigger?” If the answer is “investigate,” it’s noise.
Step 3: The Customer Test For each dashboard, ask: “Does this tell me about customer experience?” If no, you’re tracking vanity.
Step 4: The Prediction Test For each metric, ask: “Does this predict problems before customers notice?” If no, you’re always reactive.
One client deleted 73% of their metrics using this framework. Incident response time dropped from 45 minutes to 8 minutes.
THIS WEEK’S PLATFORM PSYCHOLOGY INSIGHT
From last week’s Hero Dependency Assessments (thank you to the 127 who took it!):
Average hero dependency score: 7.2/10 (dangerously high)
But here’s the pattern: Teams with the LOWEST hero dependency had the BEST metrics.
Why? Heroes hide problems with manual fixes. When you remove heroes, you’re forced to build systems that actually work.
The uncomfortable truth: Your hero is probably covering up metric failures you don’t even know about.
YOUR 5-MINUTE METRIC MAKEOVER
Replace these vanity metrics with business metrics:
Instead of: CPU utilization
Track: Response time at 95th percentile
Instead of: Pod count
Track: Cost per customer transaction
Instead of: Deployment frequency
Track: Features shipped per sprint
Instead of: Memory usage
Track: User session success rate
Instead of: Uptime percentage
Track: Revenue-impacting incidents
READER SUCCESS: THE METRIC REVOLUTION
“Steve, we implemented your 5 metrics last month. Yesterday, our Customer Impact Detection caught a problem 47 minutes before our old monitoring would have. Saved us £200K in lost sales and our reputation with a major client. Our CEO now asks for these numbers in every board meeting.”
- Platform Lead, Retail (Manchester)
EXCLUSIVE: SLASH PLATFORM COSTS 40% WHILE DOUBLING PERFORMANCE
Speaking of metrics that matter… I’m hosting an exclusive masterclass where I’ll show you exactly how to:
✅ Cut platform costs by 40% using the 5-Minute Complexity Audit
✅ Double performance with the Revenue Recovery Framework
✅ Live architecture teardown - I’ll review real platforms and show what to delete
✅ Post-cleanup playbook - Your step-by-step guide to sustainable platforms
When: August 19, 2025, 2:00pm GMT
Who: Limited to 12 platform leaders
Investment: Free (but the savings will be massive)
→ REGISTER NOW - Only 4 Spots Remaining
This session will transform how you think about platform costs and performance.
📢 FROM THE NEWSLETTER TO THE STAGE
I'll be at BitSummit Hamburg (Sept 4th) sharing the full story behind our biggest platform transformation - the one that started with pink post-its and ended with GitOps clarity.
"From Console Chaos to GitOps Clarity: A FinTech Transformation Tale"
Newsletter readers get 15% off with code: STEVE_BITSUMMIT
Register: https://bitsummitapp.eventify.io/t2/tickets
See you in Hamburg? Reply and let me know!
WHAT’S COMING NEXT WEEK
Issue #009: “The Platform Team That Fired Themselves (And Why It Worked)”
- When platform teams become the bottleneck
- The self-service revolution that saved £3M
- Your platform autonomy scorecard
Plus: Live results from this week’s Metric Makeovers!
Track what matters. Ignore the noise.
Steve
P.S. That £2M dashboard disaster? We replaced 47 metrics with 5. Incident detection improved 600%. Sometimes less really is more.
P.P.S. In the masterclass, I’ll show you the exact metrics that predicted 3 major platform failures before they happened. These numbers don’t lie.