Observability
In the previous section, we discussed how we can measure the performance of our delivery strategy. In this section, we will clarify shortly what observability is and what we should know about it when starting to measure.
In fact, observability is the ability of a system to expose its internal state to the outside world, which means for us that we can measure the performance of our pipelines as well as deployment tooling. In the literature, observability consists of three pillars: logging, tracing, and metrics. We will now have a closer look at each of them, as follows:
- Metrics are numeric values (as we found in the previous section) that can be used to measure the behavior of a system. We can use metrics for dashboarding, but also for alerting. Normally, we know some types of metrics:
- Counters are used to count things. For example, we can count the number of requests to our application. Normally, these metrics are always incrementing.
- Gauges are used to measure...
