In software, “observability” refers to the collection of measurements produced by application services. Observability has been historically defined by three key pillars — metrics, distributed traces, and logs. Thanks to projects such as W3C trace-context and OpenTelemetry, which promotes the standardization of data collection, built-in telemetry will soon become a must-have feature of cloud-native software.
Dynatrace believes that metrics, traces, and logs are the beginning of achieving true observability. Yet there are several critical elements missing from observability, such as user experience and topology context. Observability should be considered with this end goal: providing the full-stack context required to deliver causation-based, precise answers continuously and automatically. We call this Advanced Observability.