12. Glossary

Table 12.1 Observability Glossary

Term	Definition
Observability	The ability to determine a system’s current state based on the telemetry data it generates, such as logs and metrics, so that you can figure out what’s going on and quickly determine the root cause of problems you may not have been able to anticipate.
Application Telemetry	The automated process used to remotely collect measurements and other types of data that describe application status. The data is sent from applications to observability backends for analysis to improve system performance.
Telemetry Data	The data generated and forwarded by the Application Telemetry process, including all logs, metrics, events, and traces that are created by the applications.
OpenTelemetry	An open-source CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) project that provides a collection of tools, vendor-neutral APIs, and SDKs for capturing metrics, distributed traces, and logs from applications. Formed from the merger of the OpenCensus and OpenTracing projects, OpenTelemetry resolves the problem of integration with different observability backend technologies.