You may also like: The Observability Pipeline
“[You’ve] been fighting with one arm behind your back. What happens when [you’re] finally set free?”
— Paraphrasing Carol Danvers, a.k.a. Captain Marvel
BOOK REVIEW: ''How to Architect and Build Highly Observable Systems'' by Baron Schwartz
Observability is a property of an application or system, not the actual act of analysis. The system is observable, practically and mathematically, if you can understand its inner workings and state by measuring its external behaviors. That means the system exposes telemetry, which is the data emitted from instrumentation that expresses those external behaviors — a feature ideally baked into your code upfront. Monitoring is the act of analyzing the telemetry to see whether the system is functioning correctly. Diagnostics is the process of determining what’s wrong with a system.