Observability

ASAMI, Tomoharu

Term

observability

Aliases

-

Definition

Observability represents the property of a system or domain whereby its internal state can be inferred and understood through external observations.

It goes beyond simple monitoring: by consistently collecting and correlating phenomena and observations, and interpreting them as domain events, observability enables a comprehensive understanding of system behavior.

Remarks

  • The concept of observability originates from control theory; in software engineering, it refers to how well a system’s behavior can be understood from the outside.

  • While monitoring focuses on supervising known conditions, observability emphasizes the ability to discover unknown states or issues.

  • Observability is achieved by integrating diverse observation records such as logs, metrics, and traces.

  • In SimpleModeling, observability is modeled through the flow from Phenomenon to Observation to Domain Event, giving meaning to observation records.

EXAMPLES

要素 説明

Logs

Textual records of events and operations

Metrics

Numeric data representing performance and resource usage

Traces

Request paths across distributed systems

Dashboards

Visualization of observations to support analysis

Alerts

Mechanisms to notify when anomalies are detected