Observability Architecture & Implementation Guide

Observability is a measure of how well internal states of a system can be inferred solely from knowledge of its external outputs (metrics, logs, traces, and profiles). In complex distributed microservices, observability allows engineers to ask novel, open-ended questions about system failure modes without deploying new code.

graph TD
    System[Distributed System & Kubernetes Workloads] --> Telemetry[OpenTelemetry Collector Pipeline]

    subgraph The Core Signals
        Telemetry --> Metrics[Metrics: Numerical aggregations over time<br/>Prometheus / VictoriaMetrics]
        Telemetry --> Logs[Logs: Discrete timestamped event records<br/>Loki / OpenSearch / Wazuh]
        Telemetry --> Traces[Traces: Request journeys across services<br/>Tempo / Jaeger / SigNoz]
        Telemetry --> Profiles[Profiles: CPU and memory flamegraphs<br/>Parca / Pyroscope]
    end

    Metrics --> Dashboard[Unified Visualization & Correlation: Grafana]
    Logs --> Dashboard
    Traces --> Dashboard
    Profiles --> Dashboard

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1. The Three Pillars of Observability

Signal	Nature	Strength	Limitation
Metrics	Periodic numeric counters, gauges, and histograms	Extremely cost-effective; real-time alerting; trend visualization	Zero context into individual customer requests
Logs	Structured JSON strings emitted per event	Rich contextual detail and error stack traces	Expensive storage; difficult to correlate across microservices
Traces	Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) of spans representing distributed transactions	Pinpoints exact latency bottlenecks and cross-network failures	Sampling required at scale to control costs

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2. Core Curricula & Hands-On Guides

• Prometheus architecture, logging, tracing and alerting: one note per signal, plus how to act on them.
• OpenTelemetry (OTel) Full Curriculum: Complete 13-module guide to the vendor-neutral telemetry standard (Traces, Metrics, Logs, Collector, Context Propagation, and Kubernetes deployment).
• Instrumenting with Prometheus: Exposing custom application metrics using client libraries.

Further reading

• Observability (video)
• Observability: Excellent video to know how to have proper observability in distributed systems (thread)

Across the wiki

• Observability on EKS — cluster observability (Kubernetes)
• AKS Observability — Container Insights, Managed Prometheus, and ContainerLogV2 — cluster observability (Azure)
• GKE Observability Architecture — Managed Prometheus (GMP), Logging, and Trace — cluster observability (GCP)
• Metrics Sources & Observability Architecture — cluster observability (Kubernetes)