Observability

Gain deep visibility into your systems with the three pillars of observability. Understand not just what went wrong, but why.

The Three Pillars

Modern observability is built on three complementary signals that together provide complete system visibility.

Logs

Discrete events that capture what happened in your system. Structured logs with context provide the forensic trail needed to debug issues.

  • Structured JSON logging
  • Centralized log aggregation
  • Log correlation with trace IDs
  • Log levels and filtering

Metrics

Numeric measurements aggregated over time. Metrics tell you what is happening at a high level and help detect anomalies.

  • RED method (Rate, Errors, Duration)
  • USE method (Utilization, Saturation, Errors)
  • SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs
  • Custom business metrics

Traces

End-to-end request journeys through distributed systems. Traces reveal latency bottlenecks and service dependencies.

  • Distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry
  • Span analysis and waterfall views
  • Service dependency mapping
  • Critical path identification

Observability Tools

The most popular tools in the observability ecosystem.

Grafana

Visualization and dashboarding platform for metrics, logs, and traces.

Prometheus

Time-series database and monitoring system for metrics collection.

Datadog

Cloud-scale monitoring and analytics platform with APM.

Jaeger

Open-source distributed tracing platform by Uber.

OpenTelemetry

Vendor-neutral standard for collecting telemetry data.

Elastic Stack

ELK stack for log management, search, and analytics.

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