Metrics, Tracing, and Health Checks
Observability combines logs, metrics, and traces to explain system behavior. Metrics answer questions such as how many requests are arriving, how long they take, and how many fail. Distributed tracing follows a request across services.
Health endpoints should distinguish between basic process liveness and readiness to receive traffic.
Observability Pipeline
Key Takeaways
- Logs, metrics, and traces provide complementary observability.
- Readiness and liveness checks answer different operational questions.
- Correlation IDs make distributed debugging significantly easier.
Knowledge Check
What does distributed tracing help you understand?