havainnoitavuutta

Observability, or havainnoitavuutta in Finnish, refers to the ability to understand the internal state of a system based on its external outputs. In computing and software engineering, it's a crucial concept for managing complex, distributed systems. Observability allows engineers to ask questions about their system's behavior that they might not have anticipated during its design. This is achieved by collecting and analyzing various types of telemetry data, commonly known as logs, metrics, and traces.

Logs provide detailed, event-based records of what happened within a system. Metrics are numerical measurements that represent the system's performance over time, such as CPU usage or request latency. Traces track the journey of a request as it flows through different services and components of a distributed system, revealing dependencies and bottlenecks.

Effective observability goes beyond simply monitoring. While monitoring tells you that a system is down or performing poorly, observability helps you understand *why* it's down or performing poorly. This deeper understanding is vital for rapid troubleshooting, performance optimization, and ensuring the overall reliability and health of modern applications. The goal is to have sufficient insight to diagnose issues proactively and reactively, even for novel or unexpected problems.

---