Observability

Observability goes beyond traditional monitoring. While monitoring tells you when something is wrong, observability helps you understand why. The three pillars are: Logs (discrete events), Metrics (aggregated measurements), and Traces (request flow across services). In distributed systems with microservices, observability is essential because failures can cascade across services in unpredictable ways. Distributed tracing tools like Jaeger and Zipkin track requests across service boundaries. Observability platforms like Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, and Splunk aggregate signals from all three pillars into unified dashboards and alerting.