Monitoring and observability
In the real world, building an application is just the first step. We also need to monitor and observe how the application is performing. This is where the concept of observability comes in. In this section, we will discuss observability and how to use OpenTelemetry to monitor and observe applications.
What is observability?
In Chapter 4, we introduced logging in ASP.NET Core web API applications. We learned how to use the built-in logging framework to log messages to different logging providers. Observability is a more comprehensive concept than logging. Besides logging, observability allows us to gain a deeper understanding of how the application is performing. For instance, we can determine how many requests are processed in a given hour, what the request latency is, and how requests are handled by multiple services in a microservice architecture. All of these are part of observability.
In general, observability has three pillars:
- Logs...
