Observability
The ability to understand a system’s internal state and behaviour from the telemetry and contextual information it produces.
Observability shortens incident diagnosis, supports reliability and capacity decisions, and makes distributed systems and automation accountable in production.
A team correlates a slow customer request across a trace, service metrics, deployment metadata, and logs to identify a database query introduced by a recent release.
Collecting large volumes of telemetry does not guarantee insight. Poor instrumentation, missing context, uncontrolled cardinality, retention costs, and alert noise can undermine observability.
Observable systems emit correlated signals such as traces, metrics, logs, events, and profiles. Instrumentation, context propagation, service metadata, and queryable telemetry allow teams to investigate known and novel failures and ask why behaviour occurred.
Data Engineering, Intelligent Automation
OpenTelemetry — Observability primer — https://opentelemetry.io/docs/concepts/observability-primer; OpenTelemetry Signals — https://opentelemetry.io/docs/concepts/signals/