What are the three pillars of observability?
The three pillars of observability are:
- Metrics: Numerical measurements aggregated over time (CPU usage, request rate, error rate). Good for dashboards and alerting on trends.
- Logs: Timestamped records of discrete events. Good for debugging specific incidents and understanding what happened.
- Traces: Records of a request’s journey through a distributed system. Essential for finding bottlenecks and understanding service dependencies in microservices.
Together they answer: Is something wrong? (metrics), What is wrong? (logs), Where and why is it wrong? (traces).