Metrics

What is a Percentile in Observability? When we talk about observability, especially metrics like latency, we often hear terms such as p50, p95, or p99. These are percentiles. They give us a way to understand not just the average behavior of a system, but how it performs for the majority (or the unlucky few) of requests. Simple Definition A percentile tells you the value below which a given percentage of measurements fall. ...

Introduction OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework for cloud-native software, providing a set of APIs, libraries, agents, and instrumentation to collect metrics, logs, and traces. It’s a powerful tool for gaining insight into distributed systems and performance bottlenecks. In this article, we’ll walk through what OpenTelemetry is, why you should use it, and how to set it up step-by-step. Why OpenTelemetry? Unified Observability: One standard for logs, metrics, and traces. Vendor-Neutral: Export data to systems like Prometheus, Jaeger, or commercial APMs. Extensible: Support for multiple languages and platforms. Step-by-Step Guide Step 1: Install the Collector Use the OpenTelemetry Collector to receive, process, and export telemetry data. ...

What is Observability? Have you ever deployed an app to production and something just felt… off? Maybe it’s slower than usual. Maybe users are seeing errors, but you’re not sure why. This is where observability comes in. Observability is about answering the question: “What’s going on inside my system?” 🧠 The Core Idea Observability is the ability to understand the internal state of a system based on the data it produces: logs, metrics, and traces. ...