Glossary Observability
Observability
TechOperations
Definition
The property of a system whose internal state can be inferred from what it emits — logs, metrics, traces — well enough to answer a question nobody thought to ask when it was built
Distinct from monitoring, which watches for the failures you predicted. Here it is the evlog wide-event work (one structured event per request), the Sentry entry in the registry, and the analytics reports fed back into the site's own charts: three different emitters, one question — what is actually happening.
Not "is it up" but "why did it do that". The test of an observable system is a question it can answer that was not anticipated; a dashboard of predicted failures is monitoring, which is the smaller thing.