Open Source Observability Stack Essentials is a comprehensive, hands-on course designed to give software engineers, SREs, and platform engineers practical experience setting up and using an open-source observability stack to diagnose real production issues. Taught by Luca Berton in collaboration with Starweaver, this Coursera program covers Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry — the open-source trio used across the industry.
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What You’ll Learn
- ✅ Explain the roles of metrics, logs, and traces and map Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry to each signal
- ✅ Deploy a minimal local stack: scrape metrics with Prometheus, route telemetry via OTel Collector, and visualize in Grafana
- ✅ Instrument a sample app with OpenTelemetry and confirm traces/metrics flow end-to-end
- ✅ Build a practical three-panel Grafana dashboard tracking requests, errors, and latency
- ✅ Configure noise-aware alerts with proper thresholds and time windows
- ✅ Navigate from a dashboard panel to related spans using exemplars for root-cause analysis
Skills You’ll Gain
- Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and burn rate alerts
- Data Pipelines and Collector configurations
- Event Monitoring and system monitoring
- Site Reliability Engineering practices
- DevOps observability patterns
Tools You’ll Learn
- Prometheus — metrics collection and PromQL analysis
- Grafana — dashboards, alerting, and trace visualization
- OpenTelemetry — vendor-neutral instrumentation SDKs and Collector pipelines
- Docker — local stack deployment with Docker Compose
- Kubernetes — container orchestration fundamentals
Who Should Take This Course?
If you are a:
- Software Engineer
- Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
- Platform Engineer
- DevOps Engineer
…this course is built for you! Learners should be familiar with basic Docker or Linux, YAML/JSON, and be comfortable with web apps and HTTP. Kubernetes familiarity is helpful but not required.
Course Overview
Modern cloud-native applications rarely crash outright. Instead, they fail in subtle ways — latency spikes, partial errors, or noisy dependencies. This course helps you become productive with the open-source observability trio and teaches key patterns like pull versus push collection, label hygiene, histogram quantiles, and Collector pipelines.
- Introduction and Welcome (5 min)
- What “Observability” Really Means (10 min)
- The Minimal Open-Source Stack — Architecture Flyover (10 min)
- Start the Stack with Docker Compose (10 min)
- Reading: Course Overview (5 min)
- Reading: Cheat-Sheet — Signals & Tool Roles (5 min)
- Hands-On: Stack Up! Your First Observability Environment (20 min)
- Mastering PromQL Queries (12 min)
- Build the Three-Panel Dashboard (11 min)
- Alerting Fundamentals: Thresholds & Windows (10 min)
- Reading: Starter PromQL Snippets (5 min)
- Hands-On: Build Your First Production Dashboard (20 min)
- OTel SDK: Minimal App Instrumentation (11 min)
- Build Collector Pipelines (10 min)
- From Panel to Span: Root-Cause Analysis (14 min)
- Course Wrap-Up (5 min)
- Reading: Correlating Traces & Metrics (5 min)
- Assignment: Open Source Observability Stack Essentials (25 min)
- Hands-On: From Code to Trace — Root-Cause Detection (20 min)
- Project: Production Ready — Full-Stack Observability Capstone (60 min)
Key Observability Patterns Covered
Throughout the course, you will learn essential observability patterns that apply to any production environment:
- Pull vs. Push collection — understanding when to use each approach
- Label hygiene — keeping cardinality under control for sustainable metrics
- Histogram quantiles — computing meaningful latency percentiles with
histogram_quantile() - Collector pipelines — configuring receivers → processors → exporters
- Exemplars — correlating metrics with traces for rapid root-cause analysis
- Dashboard JSON export — version-controlling your dashboards
Certificate
Upon completion, you’ll earn a shareable certificate from Coursera, verifying your observability stack expertise — perfect for adding to your LinkedIn or resume.
Last updated: February 2026 – Included with Coursera Plus.
About the Instructor
Luca Berton is an experienced educator in automation, cloud-native technologies, and DevOps practices. With thousands of learners worldwide, he simplifies complex topics into digestible, practical lessons that deliver real-world results.
Ready to master the open-source observability stack? Enroll now and build production-ready monitoring from day one.
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