Observability — glossary
TL;DR
Understanding system state from external outputs — logs, metrics, traces.
Key facts
- Term
- Observability
TL;DR
Observability is the ability to understand internal system state from external outputs — metrics, logs, and traces — without SSHing into every box during an incident.
Observability vs monitoring
Monitoring tells you something crossed a threshold. Observability helps you ask new questions (why did p99 spike only on queue workers after deploy 1842?).