What is Observability? — UK Software Development Guide
Direct Answer
Observability is the ability to understand the internal state of a software system by examining its external outputs. The three pillars of observability are: Metrics (numerical measurements of system behaviour over time — CPU, memory, request rates, error rates), Logs (structured records of events that occurred in the system), and Traces (records of requests flowing through distributed systems, connecting the dots between services).
Observability in the UK
Observability has specific UK regulatory significance. UK GDPR Article 32 requires the ability to "restore the availability and access to personal data in a timely manner" — observability enables rapid incident detection and recovery. FCA operational resilience (PS21/3) requires firms to define and meet impact tolerances — observability is the technical mechanism for measuring whether tolerances are being maintained. NHS DSP Toolkit Standard 6 expects documented security monitoring. ClickMasters implements: Datadog (enterprise) or Prometheus/Grafana (open source) for metrics, ELK stack or CloudWatch Logs for logging, and OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing on all production systems.
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