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ADSArchitecture Description Standard

4.1 Operational Excellence

RecommendedAWS Ops ExcellenceAzure Ops ExcellenceGCP Ops Excellence

Purpose

Section titled “Purpose”

Operational Excellence focuses on how the solution is monitored, operated, and improved over time. It covers observability (logging, metrics, tracing), alerting, capacity management, and operational procedures. Evaluate this quality attribute across all architectural views documented in Section 3.

4.1.1 Observability - Logging

Section titled “4.1.1 Observability - Logging”
Recommended

Log Architecture

Section titled “Log Architecture”
Log Type Events Logged Local Storage Retention Period Remote Services
Application logs [what is logged] [file system, database] [period] [e.g., Datadog, CloudWatch]
Data store logs [what is logged] [location] [period] [remote service]
Infrastructure logs [what is logged] [location] [period] [remote service]
Security event logs [what is logged] [location] [period] [SIEM service]

Guidance

For each log type, document:

  • What events are captured (application errors, access logs, audit events, etc.)
  • Where logs are stored locally within the application
  • How long logs are retained before rotation or deletion
  • Whether logs are forwarded to centralised logging or SIEM services

4.1.2 Observability - Monitoring & Alerting

Section titled “4.1.2 Observability - Monitoring & Alerting”
Recommended

Operational Alerts

Section titled “Operational Alerts”

Describe how operational alerts are implemented:

Alert Category Trigger Condition Notification Method Recipient
[e.g., Application error rate] [threshold] [email, PagerDuty, Slack] [team/role]

Monitoring Tools

Section titled “Monitoring Tools”
Capability Tool Coverage
Application Performance Monitoring [e.g., Datadog, New Relic] [which components]
Infrastructure Monitoring [e.g., CloudWatch, Prometheus] [which resources]
Log Aggregation [e.g., ELK, Splunk, Datadog Logs] [which log sources]
Distributed Tracing [e.g., Jaeger, X-Ray, Datadog APM] [which services]

4.1.3 Capacity Monitoring

Section titled “4.1.3 Capacity Monitoring”
Comprehensive
Question Response
What metrics are collected for capacity monitoring? [CPU, memory, storage, network, queue depth]
How are capacity trends analysed? [tools, dashboards, reports]
Are capacity thresholds and alerts configured? [threshold details]
Is there a capacity planning process? [process description]

4.1.4 Operational Procedures

Section titled “4.1.4 Operational Procedures”
Comprehensive

Document key operational procedures and runbooks:

Procedure Description Owner Documentation
Incident response [how incidents are detected and resolved] [team] [link]
Change management [how changes are approved and deployed] [team] [link]
Escalation paths [escalation procedures] [team] [link]
On-call rotation [on-call structure] [team] [link]

Scoring Guidance

Score What This Looks Like
1 Monitoring tool identified but not configured
3 Centralised logging, monitoring, and alerting in place; runbooks documented
5 All of the above plus distributed tracing enabled, dashboards defined, incident response procedures tested