Observability helps teams understand distributed systems: what's slow, what's broken, and what needs to be done to improve performance.

But distributed systems present unique operational and maintenance challenges. When something breaks, it can be difficult to restore service quickly, or even know where to begin.

Understanding multi-layered architectures requires more than traditional logs and infrastructure metrics.

In this guide, we cover:

• Common observability challenges in distributed systems
• Understanding telemetry data: logs, metrics, and traces
• The “three pillars of observability”
• Managing observability with SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs