Observability - Logs, Metrics and Traces

Logs, metrics, and traces are not the same thing.

Most teams start with: "Let's push some logs and add a dashboard."

Then an incident hits and nobody knows where to look.

Metrics

Is the system healthy?

Logs

What exactly happened?

Traces

Where did it go wrong across services?

Best Practice

During a real incident:

Summary and Conclusions

If you only have logs, you drown in text.
If you only have metrics, you see the fire but not the cause.
If you have all three, you can actually fix things fast.

Observability is not a "nice to have" anymore.
It's core SRE.

Author

Sagar Mehta is Atgen Software Solutions Founder and a recognised expert in the field of Intelligent Automation, including Robotic Process Automation, Workload Automation, DevOps, SRE and Advanced Analytics. Sagar advocates a pragmatic approach to Automation, encouraging a policy of using ‘the best tool for the job’.

Prior to co-founding Atgen Software Solutions, Sagar worked in Senior Automation roles, architecting and delivering robust, scalable solutions for many of the world’s biggest banks and working with leading Automation vendors. He developed his first automated solution in 2006 and has continued to deliver robust, scalable and sophisticated Automation ever since.

Sagar is a regular guest speaker and panellist at Automation seminars, conferences and user group events.