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DevOps & Automation · Foundational

Observability

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

Definition

Monitoring tells you when known problems occur; observability lets you ask new questions about unknown failure modes. It relies on rich, correlated telemetry with high-cardinality context and tooling to explore it.

Example

Using a trace ID from a slow request to jump to the related logs and the failing downstream span.

Exam tip

Distinguish observability (explore unknown-unknowns) from monitoring (alert on known conditions).

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