Monitoring and Observability (Concept)
March 27, 2025 · View on GitHub
Description
Learn how to build tooling to help you understand and debug your production systems.
Tags
capability, technical, core
Documentation
Good monitoring is a staple of high-performing teams. DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) research shows that a comprehensive monitoring and observability solution, along with a number of other technical practices, positively contributes to continuous delivery.
DORA’s research defined these terms as follows:
Monitoring is tooling or a technical solution that allows teams to watch and understand the state of their systems. Monitoring is based on gathering predefined sets of metrics or logs.
Observability is tooling or a technical solution that allows teams to actively debug their system. Observability is based on exploring properties and patterns not defined in advance.
To do a good job with monitoring and observability, your teams should have the following:
* Reporting on the overall health of systems (Are my systems functioning? Do my systems have sufficient resources available?).
* Reporting on system state as experienced by customers (Do my customers know if my system is down and have a bad experience?).
* Monitoring for key business and systems metrics.
* Tooling to help you understand and debug your systems in production.
* Tooling to find information about things you did not previously know (that is, you can identify unknown unknowns).
* Access to tools and data that help trace, understand, and diagnose infrastructure problems in your production environment, including interactions between services.
Other Relations
| From | Name | To | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monitoring and Observability | enables | Fast Feedback |
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