Observability
Collecting logs, metrics, and traces so you can understand what your system is doing right now and why it failed.
Think of it like
Installing cameras and a dashboard in your factory so you can see what's happening on the assembly line.
Example
When a request is slow, you can see traces showing where time was spent: 2s in tokenization, 3s in model forward pass, 1s in response serialization.
How it actually works
Observability is three pillars: logs (discrete events), metrics (aggregated numbers over time), and traces (request journeys through the system). You need all three — logs tell you *what* happened, metrics show *patterns*, traces show *cause*. Good observability tools let you correlate them.
For product teams
Observability is how you know if users are happy and where money is being wasted.
For engineers
Instrument all critical paths; use structured logging; emit traces; correlate with spans.
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