Observability and Monitoring for Complex Systems
Observability and Monitoring for Complex Systems In modern software, health is not a single number. Complex systems span many services, regions, and data stores. Observability helps teams answer: what happened, why, and what to do next. Monitoring is the ongoing practice of watching signals and catching issues early. Together they guide reliable software. Pillars of observability Metrics: fast, aggregated numbers like latency, error rate, and throughput. Traces: end-to-end request paths to see where delays occur. Logs: contextual records with events and messages for problem details. Events and runtime signals: deployment changes, feature flags, and resource usage. How to set meaningful goals Start with clear objectives. Define SLOs (service level objectives) and error budgets. Decide what constitutes an acceptable latency or failure rate for critical flows. Tie alerts to these goals, so teams focus on meaningful deviations rather than noise. ...