Observability terms
You cannot fix what you cannot see
Running software in production without observability is flying blind. Metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alerting, and the three pillars of observability give you the insight needed to understand what your system is actually doing under real conditions. This category covers the tools, patterns, and vocabulary of production-grade visibility.
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Most referenced — Observability
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Category total931 pings
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Distinct agents10
Structured Logging PHP 8.0+
Emitting log entries as machine-parseable key-value pairs (JSON) rather than free-form strings — enabling filtering, aggregation, and alerting.
1mo ago
observability intermediate
Alerting Best Practices
Good alerts are actionable, symptom-based, and rare — page on user impact, not causes. Alert fatigue from noisy alerts is as dangerous as no alerts.
2mo ago
observability intermediate
APM — Application Performance Monitoring PHP 7.0+
APM tools (Datadog, New Relic, Blackfire) automatically instrument applications to profile code-level performance — identifying slow DB queries, N+1 problems, and method-level bottlenecks.
2mo ago
observability intermediate
Canary Deployment & Observability
Canary deployments route a small percentage of traffic to a new version — compare its golden signals against the stable version before full rollout to catch regressions automatically.
2mo ago
observability intermediate
Cardinality in Metrics
Cardinality is the number of unique label value combinations — high cardinality (user_id, URL, session_id as labels) creates millions of time series and crashes Prometheus.
2mo ago
observability intermediate
Cardinality in Observability PHP 7.0+
The number of unique combinations of label values in a metric — high cardinality (millions of unique label combinations) causes memory exhaustion in time-series databases and is the most common observability scaling problem.
2mo ago
observability intermediate
Correlation ID Pattern
A correlation ID is a unique identifier attached to every request and propagated through all logs, services, and queues — enabling end-to-end request tracing through string search.
2mo ago
observability beginner
Distributed Tracing
Distributed tracing tracks a request as it flows through multiple services — each service adds a span to a shared trace, giving end-to-end visibility into latency and failures.
2mo ago
observability intermediate
Error Budget
Error budget is the allowed amount of unreliability within an SLO period — 99.9% SLO = 43.8 min/month downtime allowed. When budget is exhausted, reliability takes priority over features.
2mo ago
observability intermediate
Four Golden Signals
Google SRE's Four Golden Signals — Latency, Traffic, Errors, Saturation — are the four metrics that, if monitored and alerted on, cover most production reliability concerns.
2mo ago
observability beginner
Grafana & Dashboards
Grafana is the de facto open-source dashboard platform — connecting to Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, and 50+ data sources to visualise metrics, logs, and traces in a unified UI.
2mo ago
observability beginner
Health Check Patterns
Health checks report service status to load balancers and orchestrators — /health/live (is the process running?), /health/ready (can it serve traffic?), and deep health checks for dependencies.
2mo ago
observability beginner
Log Aggregation (ELK/Loki)
Log aggregation collects logs from all services into a central searchable store — ELK (Elasticsearch+Logstash+Kibana) for full-text search, Loki (Prometheus-style) for cost-efficient label-based search.
2mo ago
observability intermediate
Log Levels & When to Use Each
Log levels (DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, ERROR, CRITICAL) communicate severity — use the right level so alerts fire on real issues and noise doesn't mask real problems.
2mo ago
observability beginner
On-Call & Runbooks
A runbook documents how to diagnose and resolve specific alerts — on-call engineers shouldn't have to think from scratch at 3am; the runbook provides the playbook.
2mo ago
observability beginner
OpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry (OTel) is the open standard for telemetry — a vendor-neutral SDK for traces, metrics, and logs that exports to any backend (Jaeger, Datadog, Honeycomb, Prometheus).
2mo ago
observability intermediate
P50/P95/P99 Latency Percentiles
Latency percentiles (P50, P95, P99) tell you what most users experience — P99 means '99% of requests are faster than this', revealing the worst experiences that averages hide.
2mo ago
observability beginner
Prometheus Concepts
Prometheus is a pull-based metrics system — services expose /metrics in text format, Prometheus scrapes them, stores as time series, and evaluates alerting rules via PromQL.
2mo ago
observability intermediate
SLO / SLI / SLA
SLI (what you measure), SLO (your internal target), SLA (your customer commitment) — the hierarchy that turns vague 'uptime' promises into measurable operational objectives.
2mo ago
observability intermediate
Spans & Traces
A trace is one request's full journey; spans are the individual operations within it — each span has a name, start time, duration, status, and optional attributes.
2mo ago
observability beginner