Observability is the ability to understand a system's internal state from its external outputs. In distributed systems, where traditional debugging is impossible, observability is the primary tool for understanding production behaviour, diagnosing failures, and validating system health.
Overview
mindmap
root((Observability\nand Monitoring))
Three Pillars
Metrics
Counters
Gauges
Histograms
Summaries
Traces
Distributed traces
Spans
Context propagation
Sampling
Logs
Structured logging
Log levels
Correlation IDs
Monitoring Approaches
Infrastructure monitoring
Application monitoring
Synthetic monitoring
Real User Monitoring RUM
Black-box vs White-box
Alerting and Incidents
Alert fatigue
Symptom based alerts
Cause based alerts
SLO burn rate alerts
Escalation policies
Log Management
Centralized logging
Log aggregation
Search and analysis
Retention policies
Topics in This Section
| File | Topic | Key Concepts |
|---|---|---|
| 01_three_pillars.md | Three Pillars | Metrics, traces, logs |
| 02_monitoring_approaches.md | Monitoring Approaches | Infrastructure, APM, synthetic, RUM |
| 03_alerting_incident_management.md | Alerting & Incidents | Alert design, burn rate, incident response |
| 04_log_management.md | Log Management | Structured logging, aggregation, retention |