What concept uses logs, metrics, and traces to understand system behavior?

• A. Security
• B. Performance tuning
• C. Observability
• D. Documentation

Answer: (C)

Observability is the practice of understanding how a system behaves by looking at logs, metrics, and traces. Logs capture events and messages from the system, providing detailed context about what happened and when. Metrics turn data into numbers over time, letting you see trends, patterns, and anomalies in performance and reliability. Traces show how a request moves through different services, revealing latency, dependencies, and where delays occur. Together, these signals let you infer the system’s internal state and answer questions like where a problem started, why performance degraded, and which component is the bottleneck, even for issues you didn’t anticipate. This approach is distinct from security, which focuses on protecting the system; performance tuning, which aims to optimize performance; and documentation, which records information but doesn’t by itself reveal runtime behavior through signals.