Observability Glossary

Error Rate

The error rate of an application is the frequency at which errors occur in the application. It measure the proportion of failed requests or operations relative to the total number of requests or operations over a given period.

For example, if an e-commerce website experiences a 5% error rate during peak traffic hours, it means that 5 out of every 100 transactions are resulting in errors, potentially leading to lost sales and poor user experience.

You can monitor the error rate of your application and identify patterns, anomalies, and potential causes of errors. Typically leveraging modern observability tools such as OpenTelemetry enable you to measure error rates and more importantly give you deep insights in your application that can lead to the root-cause of errors.

Explore related concepts

Monitoring

Monitoring is the act of tracking the performance and behavior of a system, application, or service in real-time, allowing for the detection of issues, anomalies, and performance bottlenecks. It involves collecting and analyzing metrics to ensure that everything is running smoothly and to identify potential areas for improvement.

Incident Management

Incident Management is the process of identifying, responding to, and resolving incidents that occur within an application. It involves detecting when something goes wrong, alerting the appropriate teams, working to restore normal operations as quickly as possible, and implementing measures to prevent the same issue to occur in the future.

Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection is the process of identifying unexpected or irregular patterns in telemetry data that is far from the norm, which usually means something is off and requires human attention.