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title: "What is Observability?"
chapter: true
weight: 1
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# What is Developer Observability?
 
In order to best understand what *Developer Observability* is, it's probably best to first consider what *Observability* itself is all about. 

## An Introduction to Observability

The capacity to comprehend a system's internal state by examining its exterior outputs is known as **Observability**. It is a property of a system, and as such is most often referred to in the context of *system operators* - the individuals in charge of maintaining, deploying and operating the application to serve the customers using it.

Observability enables teams to monitor and analyze the overall system's condition - it is supposed to help when answering questions like:

- Where is the error? What is is its severity?
- Why has it occurred? Who are the culprits?
- How has it occurred? What characterizes it?
- (Ideally) How can we fix it and get the system back into operation?

Observability, traditionally, gives insight both into how each component of the system operates but - more importantly - how the system operates as a whole. It helps boost reliability, and ensures that even when trouble arrives there's a backstop in the form of a concrete, accessible stream of information to the system's health.

Even when many platforms are at play, observability enables the collection, storage, and analysis of massive volumes of data from all over network frontiers, providing operators with a full view of what is occurring within a system.

As cloud-native systems have grown more complicated and it has become harder to identify the probable root causes of a failure or anomaly, observability has become increasingly crucial in past years. Teams are understanding the benefits of observability data for both development and business as they start accumulating and using it.