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Observability & Operations

Production systems are complex. Distributed services fail in unexpected ways. Customers experience issues before your team knows they exist. Traditional monitoring—dashboards showing CPU and memory—tells you the system is broken but not why. Observability is different: it's the ability to ask arbitrary questions about your system without pre-instrumenting for answers.

This section covers the complete observability and operational discipline needed to run systems at scale:

  • Logging structures data to understand what happened and when
  • Metrics quantify system behavior and business outcomes
  • Tracing tracks requests across service boundaries to pinpoint failure
  • Alerting wakes up the right person at the right time with actionable information
  • Capacity & Performance Ops ensures your system has resources to serve and scales predictably

Together, these practices enable you to understand your system in production, troubleshoot incidents fast, and make data-driven decisions about architecture and investment.