Where to measure the service

The closer you measure to the user, the truer the signal usually is.

Client

Most honest

Captures real user experience, but harder to instrument and noisier.

Edge

Practical compromise

Sees most infrastructure failures before the app, but not all client-side issues.

Service

Easiest to collect

Misses outages where requests never reach the application at all.

Classic interview trap

If you only measure at the application layer, a DNS failure or load-balancer outage can disappear from your SLI because the app never saw the requests.

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