Observability Summit North America 2026

Saturation has long been the stepchild of "the Four Golden Signals of SRE". While latency, traffic, and errors are directly measurable through metrics like P99, RPS, and 5xx rates, monitoring just how "full" a service is relies on indirect symptoms such as CPU usage or queue depth. Yet, saturation should ideally rather be the first signal to alert, as once it's reached, other signals - latency and errors - spike fast.

The inability to directly observe and mitigate saturation drives excessive safety margins, chronically low CPU utilization and massive compute waste in latency-sensitive and customer-facing systems. This session introduces an open-source approach extending Envoy proxy and its seamless integration through eBPF and Cilium, to provide direct observability into service saturation, by comparing each instance's live number of concurrent requests to its true concurrency limit. We then explore how such direct visualization of saturation can help reduce MTTR and minimize waste.