Observability is important for applications running critical businesses. It is an ability to observe an application’s internal state from outside. As often said, logs, metrics, and traces are three pillars of observability.
- Logs are chronological sequence of events. Logs are mostly recorded as plain texts (binary and structured formats are also possible) and are important for debugging and understanding system events and failures.
- Metrics are aggregated data or the current status of an event or application performance. Metrics can provide real-time insights like CPU utilization, average HTTP response time, or total HTTP requests.
- Traces provides detailed information regarding end-to-end flow from start to end. It tracks requests as it passes through an application’s various components or services. Traces are more complex than logs and metrics
In this blog, we will focus on metrics. Spring Boot provides auto-configuration for integration with Micrometer. It is like SLF4J but for observability.
