Also known as: telemetry · tracing · OpenTelemetry
Observability is the degree to which a system's internal state can be understood from its external outputs — logs, metrics, and traces — particularly for diagnosing problems nobody anticipated.
The distinction from monitoring is about unknown unknowns. Monitoring checks predefined conditions; observability asks whether you can answer new questions about production behaviour without shipping new instrumentation.
Distributed tracing is the component that distinguishes modern practice, following a single request across service boundaries so that latency and failure can be attributed to a specific hop rather than inferred from correlated dashboards.
SIEM
A SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) system centralises log and event data from across an organisation's infrastructure, correlating it to detect suspicious activity and support investigation.
CI/CD
CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) is the practice of automatically building, testing, and deploying code changes, so that every commit is verified and releases become routine rather than exceptional events.
Technical Debt
Technical debt is the accumulated future cost of choosing an expedient implementation over a better one, analogous to financial debt in that it carries ongoing interest in the form of slower development and higher defect rates.
Incident Response
Incident response is the structured process an organisation follows to detect, contain, eradicate, and recover from a security incident, and to learn from it afterwards.