Distributed Services with Go

Three Types of Telemetry Data

Observability is a measure of how well we understand our system’s internals—its behavior and state—from its external outputs. We use metrics, structured logs, and traces as the outputs to make our systems observable. While there are three types of telemetry data, each with its own use case we’ll talk about, it’ll often derive from the same events. For example, each time a web service handles a request, it may increment a “requests handled” metric, emit a log for the request, and make a trace.

Metrics

Metrics measure numeric data over time, such as how many requests failed or how long each request took. Metrics like these help to define service-level indicators (SLI), objectives (SLO), and agreements (SLA). You’ll ...