Understanding Observability: A Guide to Metrics, Logs and Traces

This blog post explains observability, a method to understand how a system works by examining its outputs. Observability is different from monitoring, which just collects data. The three pillars of observability are metrics (numerical indicators), logs (event records), and traces (request flow tracking). Popular observability tools include Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, ELK Stack, Honeycomb, Datadog, New Relic, Sysdig, and Zipkin. By understanding these pillars and using the right tools, you can gain valuable insights into your system's health and troubleshoot problems before they impact users.

Observability is the ability to gain deep insights into the internal workings of a system by examining its outputs. This information is crucial for troubleshooting problems, optimizing performance, and improving security. In simpler terms, observability allows you to understand why a system is behaving the way it is.

This blog post explores the three pillars of observability: metrics, logs, and traces. We will also discuss the difference between observability and monitoring, popular observability tools, and how they can all work together to give you a complete picture of your system’s health.

What is the Difference Between Observability and Monitoring?

Monitoring is a practice of collecting data on system performance and behavior. It’s a crucial part of observability, but it doesn’t provide the same level of insight. Observability goes beyond simple data collection by allowing you to ask questions and explore the root causes of issues.

Here’s a table that summarizes the key differences between observability and monitoring:

observability vs monitoring

The Three Pillars of Observability

Observability relies on three key data sources: metrics, logs, and traces. These three pillars work together to provide a comprehensive view of your system.

Metrics are numerical indicators that offer a quick overview of a system’s health. Common metrics include CPU usage, memory usage, and disk space.
Logs are detailed records of events that occur within a system. Logs can provide valuable insights into errors, exceptions, and other issues.
Traces track the flow of a request through a system. This can help you identify bottlenecks and pinpoint the root cause of performance problems.

Best Observability Tools

There are many different observability tools available on the market, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Here are some of the most popular options:

Prometheus: An open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit known for its scalability and support for multi-dimensional data collection.
Grafana: A visualization and dashboarding platform often used with Prometheus, providing rich insights into system performance.
Jaeger: An open-source distributed tracing system for monitoring and troubleshooting microservices-based architectures.
Elasticsearch: A search and analytics engine that, when paired with Kibana and Beats, forms the ELK Stack for log management and analysis.
Honeycomb: An event-driven observability tool that offers real-time insights into application behavior and performance.
Datadog: A cloud-based observability platform that integrates logs, metrics, and traces, providing end-to-end visibility.
New Relic: Offers application performance monitoring (APM) and infrastructure monitoring solutions to track and optimize application performance.
Sysdig: Focused on container monitoring and security, Sysdig provides deep visibility into containerized applications.
Zipkin: An open-source distributed tracing system for monitoring request flows and identifying latency bottlenecks.
Squadcast: An incident management platform that integrates with various observability tools, streamlining incident response and resolution.

Conclusion

By using observability tools and understanding the three pillars of observability (metrics, logs, and traces), you can gain valuable insights into the health of your systems. This can help you to identify and troubleshoot problems before they impact your users, optimize performance, and improve security.

Looking for a Free Trial of an Incident Management Platform?

Squadcast offers a free trial of its incident management platform, which integrates with a wide range of observability tools, including Honeycomb, Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, and Grafana. In addition to these integrations, Squadcast also has a public API that you can use to integrate with other tools. This means that you can integrate Squadcast with any observability tool that has an API.

I hope this blog post has been helpful! If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment below.

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Squadcast Inc

@squadcast

Squadcast is a cloud-based software designed around Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices with best-of-breed Incident Management & On-call Scheduling capabilities.