observability
nounEtymology From observe + -ability.
1
The state of being observable.
2
A measure of the extent to which something is observable.
3
Computing, Engineering, Mathematics, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Sciences The ability to collect data about the execution of distributed programs, especially the interaction among its components.
Distributed computing
- “In 2018, we saw many companies that are cloud-native and in the tech sector talking about observability,” he said. “Last year, we saw this becoming more mainstream, with large organizations adopting cloud-native technologies and becoming interested in observability.”2021 February 18, Scott Carey, quoting Spiros Xanthos, “Observability: What IT should know as the technology heats up”, in InfoWorld:
- Observability is defined as the ability to understand the internal state of a system by only looking at external outputs of the system. […] Observability builds on monitoring and enables you to gain insights about the internal state of your application.2021, Brendan Creane, Amit Gupta, Kubernetes Security and Observability, O'Reilly, →ISBN, page 72:
1 more example
- In other words, SREs are directly responsible for the effectiveness of observability.2023, Jeremy Proffitt, Rod Anami, Becoming a Rockstar SRE: Electrify your site reliability engineering mindset to build reliable, resilient, and efficient systems, Packt Publishing Ltd, →ISBN, page 59:
- Derived terms
- coobservability, nonobservability, unobservability