The three pillars of observability
According to author Cindy Sridharan in O’Reilly there are three pillars of observability: logs, metrics, and traces:
- Logs are an immutable, timestamped record of discrete events that happened over time.
- Metrics are a numeric representation of data measured over intervals of time.
- Traces represents a series events that describe the end-to-end request flow through a distributed system.
Individually, any of these external outputs provides a useful way to monitor a system. When brought together, analyzed and interrogated in real-time, these outputs make systems observable.
