Observability is like having a detailed map and a bird's-eye view for your application. Imagine your application as a bustling festival, with various stalls (services), pathways (data flows), and visitors (user requests). Observability gives you both an overall and a detailed view of the entire festival. You can see how each stall operates, how visitors move, and how pathways connect everything. You know what's happening, where, how, and why.
For instance, consider a web application with a frontend, a backend API, and a database. In this scenario, observability enables you to track each user request as it moves through the frontend, gets processed by the backend, and interacts with the database. You can see how long each step takes, identify if a particular part of the backend is causing delays, if database queries are running slower than expected, or if an error silently hapenned in the process.
You can get good observability in your application using a mix of tools that provide insights into different aspects of the application. For example, incorporating distributed tracing can provide visibility into the flow of requests across microservices, while log management tools can help aggregate and analyze application logs to identify patterns and anomalies.