An observability platform is like having a pair of x-ray vision goggles for your application. It goes beyond basic monitoring by using modern observability techniques such as distributed tracing and wide-events to enable you quickly detect, diagnose and resolve issues in your application.
For example, imagine you have a web application that's experiencing slow response times. If you're using an observability platform observability platform, you will receive an alert when the higher latencies are detected, you'll be able to trace every request as it travels through various backends, databases, and external APIs, and ultimately, identify the issue and resolve it. You can see where the slowdown is occurring, whether it's due to high CPU utilization, database queries taking too long, or network latency issues.
Modern observability platforms rely on OpenTelemetry for instrumentation, enabling your you to proactively address issues before they impact your users.