An observability system is an integrated product or service for collecting, analyzing, visualizing, and acting on telemetry from software systems. The label has largely replaced application performance monitoring because it covers broader operational needs. section 6.2.7
Common capabilities and selection considerations include:
- Correlate traces, logs, and metrics to support root cause analysis. section 6.2.7
- Support monitoring across infrastructure, containers, databases, applications, and end users, often with dashboards, anomaly detection, integrations, or auto-instrumentation. section 6.2.7
- Compare managed offerings with internal platforms by weighing engineering effort, support, training, security patching, reliability, scalability, and total cost of ownership. section 5.6.1
Representative offerings
Aspecto emphasizes distributed tracing and OpenTelemetry-based correlation; AppDynamics spans end-user monitoring, anomaly detection, and dashboards; Datadog combines infrastructure, container, database, log, tracing, and profiling capabilities. section 6.2.7
