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Software Engineering vocabulary · Debugging and Troubleshooting

Observability

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/əbˌzɜrvəˈbɪləti/nounCommon term

In software engineering, observability means: How well you can understand what is happening inside a system from the data it produces, especially logs, metrics and traces, even for problems nobody predicted.

In Turkish: gözlemlenebilirlik, observability

How it is used

Logs, metrics and traces are often called the 'three pillars of observability'. OpenTelemetry is a common open standard for collecting this data. The short form 'o11y' appears in chats and tool names.

Example sentences

  1. Monitoring told us the API was slow; good observability showed us exactly which query was the cause.

  2. We're investing in observability before we split the monolith into microservices.

Common collocations

  • observability platform
  • improve observability
  • three pillars of observability
  • observability tools
  • monitoringContinuously collecting and checking data about systems, such as CPU use, error rates and response times, so that problems are noticed quickly.
  • logA record of events, messages and errors that a program writes while it runs, used later to understand what happened. Also a verb: to log an error.
  • metricA number measured regularly over time to show how a system is behaving, such as CPU use, memory, request count or error rate.
  • tracingFollowing a single request as it passes through many services, recording how long each step takes, so you can see where time is lost or errors happen.
  • dashboardA screen that shows the most important metrics and charts about a system in one place, so engineers can see its health at a glance.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Debugging and Troubleshooting

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