Observability in DevOps: Integrating AWS X-Ray, CloudWatch, and Open Telemetry

Observability is an extension of the monitoring approach with a slight difference. It does provide essential context to understand an issue but lacks clear dashboard-driven alerting. Observability is a broader term that can include monitoring. It is a term used to describe a system’s ability to allow the user to ask any question of it and receive an answer. The concept of observability originated in control theory, where it was defined as a measure of how well internal states of a system can be inferred from knowledge of its external outputs. That’s the technical definition, but what does it mean practically? Basically, the more observability hooks you expose regarding what’s happening inside your system, the easier it will be to answer any questions regarding your system’s state over time.