4.1 Operational Excellence

Recommended AWS Ops Excellence Azure Ops Excellence GCP Ops Excellence

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

Recommended

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

Recommended

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

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

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

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