Practice · Observability
What is observability?
Observability is the ability to understand what a system is doing internally based only on the signals it emits from the outside: its metrics, logs, and traces. A system is observable when you can answer new questions about its behavior without shipping new code to ask them.
How to get started with Observability
- 1 Instrument services with OpenTelemetry so traces, metrics, and logs share context like trace IDs and service names.
- 2 Send everything to a backend where you can query all three signals together.
- 3 Define SLOs for user-facing journeys, then alert on them.
- 4 Practice asking new questions of production data during calm weeks, not only during incidents.
The common mistake
What is the most common mistake with Observability?
Treating observability as a pile of dashboards. Dashboards answer the questions you predicted; observability is about answering the ones you did not.