Observability, explained
The observability wiki, in one place
Observability is the ability to understand what's happening inside a system by looking at the data it produces. This wiki covers the four core pillars — metrics, traces, logs, and continuous profiling — plus OpenTelemetry, the standard that ties them together, and the practices teams use to run it all in production. Every hub links to the tools people actually use.
Metrics
Numeric measurements of system behavior over time — the foundation for dashboards, alerting, and capacity planning.
Read more →Traces
End-to-end records of a single request as it moves through every service it touches — the map of how your system actually behaves.
Read more →Logs
Timestamped, discrete records of events — the most detailed and most expensive of the observability signals.
Read more →Continuous Profiling
Always-on, low-overhead sampling of exactly which code is consuming CPU, memory, or other resources in production.
Read more →OpenTelemetry
The open-source, vendor-neutral standard for instrumenting applications to produce metrics, traces, and logs.
Read more →Practices & Architecture
How teams run observability day to day — SRE practices, platform setups, cost control, and security monitoring across the four pillars.
Read more →