Observability

Kind: quality-attribute

Layer: Observability

Record: architecture:observability

Severity: contextual

Scope: service, system, runtime

Canonical: Ontology

The degree to which a system's internal behavior in production can be inferred from the logs, metrics and traces it emits.

Listed in Architecture principles, after Agentic Architecture and before Logging.

Requires

• Logs
• Metrics
• Traces

Reinforces

• Resilience
• Debuggability

Enables

• Incident Diagnosis

Conflicts with

• Unobservable Failure

In tension with

• Cost/Noise
• Information Hiding
• Information Hiding / Observability

Tensions

• Observability / Cost/Noise

Contracts

• Observability

Violated by

• Blind Operation

Refactored by

• Structured Log
• Metrics
• Distributed Tracing

Severity

• contextual

Category

• Observability / Auditability / Traceability

Reinforced by

• Centralized Logging
• Dead-Letter Queue
• Fail Fast
• Model Drift Monitoring
• SLO/SLI
• Dashboards

Required by

• Error Handling
• Self-Healing Architecture
• Canary Deployment
• Chaos Engineering

Linked from

• Tools live in the tree
• A system is a graph
• The structural domain
• Seven controls, seven classes
• Anti-patterns
• Control / Coordination / Centralization
• Correctness / Determinism / Verification
• Core Modular Design
• Event / Messaging / Asynchronous Architecture
• Error Handling / Resilience
• Model Architecture
• Observability / Auditability / Traceability
• Self-Healing / Recovery / Deployment Safety
• Core Vocabulary
• Observability / Auditability / Traceability
• Quality Attributes
• Architectural Clusters
• Severity levels
• The resolutions