Glossary · O
Observability
Understanding a system through the signals it produces
What it means
Observability is the ability to investigate a system’s internal behaviour using signals such as logs, metrics and traces. It helps teams explore why a problem is happening, including cases that were not anticipated when individual monitoring checks were configured.
What it means for a business
When checkout slows down, a team can combine latency metrics, error logs and traces to identify where requests spend time. Useful diagnosis depends on the signals collected, their context and access to the right tools; data collection alone does not explain the cause.