Three key pillars of observability

Observability uses three types of telemetry data - metrics, logs and traces to provide deep visibility into distributed systems and allow teams to get to the root cause of a multitude of issues and improve the system’s performance.

• Logs: These are structured or unstructured text records of discreet events that occurred at a specific time
• Metrics: These are the values represented as counts or measures that are often calculated or aggregated over a period of time. Metrics can originate from a variety of sources, including infrastructure, hosts, services, cloud platforms, and external sources
• Distributed tracing: This displays activity of a transaction or request as it flows through applications and shows how services connect, including code-level details