What is Observability?
The ability to understand the internal state of a system from its external outputs.
Observability is the property of a system that allows you to understand its internal state by examining its outputs — the three pillars being metrics (aggregated numbers over time), logs (discrete event records), and traces (request flows across services). A highly observable system lets you diagnose unknown failures without adding new instrumentation. OpenTelemetry provides a vendor-neutral standard for instrumenting applications for all three signals.
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Related Terms
More Monitoring Terms
AlertManager
Prometheus component that handles alert routing, grouping, and notification delivery.
Error Budget
The acceptable amount of downtime or errors before an SLO is breached.
Grafana
An open-source analytics and visualization platform for metrics, logs, and traces.
Loki
Grafana's horizontally scalable log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus.
OpenTelemetry
An open-source observability framework for generating metrics, logs, and traces.
Prometheus
An open-source monitoring system that scrapes and stores time-series metrics.
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