The term “observability” started to gain serious momentum in software engineering circles around 2018, as a natural evolution of monitoring practices. By bringing together the raw outputs of metrics, events, logs, and traces, software developers could start to gain a real-time picture of how their software systems are performing and where issues might be occurring.
The concept itself, however, has deep roots in the broader engineering principles of control theory, where the measure of the internal state of a system can be observed using only its external outputs.
