Implementing observability

Observability refers to the processes and methods involved in making the working of an application system more transparent and measurable. Increased observability of an application system will make it more monitoring-friendly. Observability is a property of the application system itself, while monitoring is an act that leverages that property for operational requirements.

Observability is relatively new to the monitoring vocabulary, but it has been repurposed from system control theory. The concept of observability was introduced by Hungarian American engineer Rudolf E. Kálmán for linear dynamic systems, and it states that observability is a measure of how well internal states of a system can be inferred from knowledge of the system's external outputs. In the context of monitoring, the external outputs could be various metrics, logs, and traces. So, a monitoring tool with observability features should help with generating and analyzing various...