DevOps Intermediate

What is Observability?

The ability to understand a system's internal state from its external outputs through metrics, logs, and traces.

Observability rests on three pillars: Metrics (numerical measurements over time — CPU, request rate, error rate), Logs (discrete events with context — error messages, audit trails), and Traces (request flow across services — distributed tracing).

OpenTelemetry is the emerging standard for instrumentation. Tools include Prometheus (metrics), ELK/Loki (logs), Jaeger/Zipkin (traces), and Datadog/New Relic (all-in-one). Observability goes beyond monitoring — it helps answer questions you did not anticipate.

Related Terms

A practice where Git repositories serve as the single source of truth for both application code and infrastructure configuration.

Container Registry

A storage and distribution service for container images, similar to a package repository but for Docker images.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

The practice of managing infrastructure through machine-readable configuration files rather than manual processes.

A declarative GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes that automatically syncs cluster state with Git repositories.

A deployment strategy that gradually replaces old application instances with new ones, maintaining availability throughout.

An open-source container orchestration platform that automates deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications.

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