Dashboards with fifty tiles teach anxiety, not action. In the Node service track we ask cohorts to agree on ten error families before writing handlers.
Each family maps to user-visible copy, retry hints, and whether support should be looped in. The exercise feels bureaucratic until someone’s “unknown_error” string appears in three services at once.
We also require a single request id field in structured logs for the capstone slice. Correlation beats volume.
This is opinionated. Your organisation may already have standards — bring them; we adapt the rubric rather than replacing wholesale.