Observability
Knowing what production is doing, and acting when it breaks.
11 concepts · 12 technologies · 1 comparison · 1 real stack
Concepts
Start with Observability- Observability14 technologiesLogs, metrics and traces that tell you what your system is doing.
- Logs11 technologiesTimestamped records of what a program did, written as it runs and shipped somewhere you can search them.
- Structured loggingLogs written as named fields (logfmt or JSON) instead of free text, so a machine can filter, group and join them.
- Metrics7 technologiesNumbers measured over time, such as requests per second, error rate or p95 latency: cheap enough to keep for every service and to alert on.
- Distributed tracing7 technologiesFollow one request through every service it touches, as a tree of timed spans that share one trace ID.
- Correlation IDsOne ID per request, created at the edge and carried through every service, message and log line, so you can find everything that request did.
- Error tracking3 technologiesCatch every exception with its stack trace and context, and fold thousands of copies into one issue you can fix.
- Synthetic monitoring3 technologiesRobots that use your product from outside on a schedule, so you learn it’s broken before a customer tells you.
- Alerting4 technologiesRules that watch your metrics and logs and wake a human only when users are, or are about to be, hurt.
- On-call1 technologyA rotation of engineers who carry the pager, so a real person answers when production breaks at 3 a.m.
- Incident management1 technologyWhen something big breaks: declare it, give one person command, keep everyone informed, stop the damage, then learn from it without blame.
Technologies
Grouped by the concept each one mainly implements
Commonly confused
See it in a real stack
Architectures that use observability conceptsWorth exploring
All resources →WebsitePlatform tooling landscapePlatformEngineering.orgA filterable map of tools for building an internal developer platform. Each tool sits in one of five “planes” (developer control, integration and delivery, resource, observability, security) and a category such as IaC, CD pipeline, secrets or developer portal, with a one-line description. Vendors can submit their own tools, so treat it as a list of what exists rather than a ranking.