observability

observe +‎ -ability

observability (countable and uncountable, plural observabilities)

1. (uncountable) The state of being observable.
2. (countable) A measure of the extent to which something is observable.
3. (computing, distributed computing) The ability to collect data about the execution of distributed programs, especially the interaction among its components.

   Synonym: o11y

   • 2021 February 18, Scott Carey, quoting Spiros Xanthos, “Observability: What IT should know as the technology heats up”, in InfoWorld‎:

     “In 2018, we saw many companies that are cloud-native and in the tech sector talking about observability,” he said. “Last year, we saw this becoming more mainstream, with large organizations adopting cloud-native technologies and becoming interested in observability.”

   • 2021, Brendan Creane, Amit Gupta, Kubernetes Security and Observability, O'Reilly, →ISBN, page 72:

     Observability is defined as the ability to understand the internal state of a system by only looking at external outputs of the system. […] Observability builds on monitoring and enables you to gain insights about the internal state of your application.

   • 2023, Jeremy Proffitt, Rod Anami, Becoming a Rockstar SRE: Electrify your site reliability engineering mindset to build reliable, resilient, and efficient systems, Packt Publishing Ltd, →ISBN, page 59:

     In other words, SREs are directly responsible for the effectiveness of observability.