What is observability?
The term "observability" in control theory states that the system is observable if the internal states of the system and, accordingly, its behavior, can be determined by only looking at its inputs and outputs. At the 2018 Observability Practitioners Summit [4], Bryan Cantrill, the CTO of Joyent and one of the creators of the tool dtrace, argued that this definition is not practical to apply to software systems because they are so complex that we can never know their complete internal state, and therefore the control theory's binary measure of observability is always zero (I highly recommend watching his talk on YouTube: https://youtu.be/U4E0QxzswQc). Instead, a more useful definition of observability for a software system ...
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