Serverless observability

Monitoring and observability are two terms that are often used interchangeably. However, they are related and often complement each other. The Google SRE book defines monitoring as follows:

“Your monitoring system should address two questions: what’s broken, and why? The ‘what’s broken’ indicates the symptom; the ‘why’ indicates a (possibly intermediate) cause. ‘What’ versus ‘why’ is one of the most important distinctions in writing good monitoring with maximum signal and minimum noise.”

Monitoring allows you to understand the state of your applications and systems by using a predefined set of metrics and logs. The assumption is that we know what can potentially go wrong and how to look out for those problems. This essentially means you are watching out for a set of known failures. This has served us well in predictably managing our applications. The issue, however, is...