A reference from Weave

Reliability and observability glossary

Understand service health, incidents, and the telemetry used to investigate production systems. Connect reliability outcomes to engineering decisions.

All terms

140 terms

  • Gauge metric

    Gauge metric is a value that can rise or fall, such as queue depth, memory, or active connections.

    Reliability and observability

  • Golden signals

    The golden signals are latency, traffic, errors, and saturation. They are a monitoring framework that focuses attention on the most useful high-level indicators of service health from a user's and operator's perspective.

    Reliability and observability

  • Head-based sampling

    Head-based sampling is a sampling decision made near the beginning of a trace before its outcome is known.

    Reliability and observability

  • Health check

    Health check is a request or probe reporting whether a service meets a defined operational condition.

    Reliability and observability

  • Health signal

    Health signal is a reliability concept used to describe a specific condition, control, or decision in the operation of software services.

    Reliability and observability

  • Histogram bucket

    Histogram bucket is a count of observations at or below a defined boundary in a distribution.

    Reliability and observability

  • Incident alert

    Incident alert is a notification that evidence suggests a disruption, degradation, or risk requiring coordinated attention.

    Reliability and observability

  • Incident bridge

    Incident bridge is a reliability concept used to describe a specific condition, control, or decision in the operation of software services.

    Reliability and observability

  • Incident channel

    Incident channel is a reliability concept used to describe a specific condition, control, or decision in the operation of software services.

    Reliability and observability

  • Incident closure

    Incident closure is a reliability concept used to describe a specific condition, control, or decision in the operation of software services.

    Reliability and observability

  • Incident commander handoff

    Incident commander handoff is a reliability concept used to describe a specific condition, control, or decision in the operation of software services.

    Reliability and observability

  • Incident communications plan

    Incident communications plan is a reliability concept used to describe a specific condition, control, or decision in the operation of software services.

    Reliability and observability

  • Incident detection latency

    Incident detection latency is a reliability concept used to describe a specific condition, control, or decision in the operation of software services.

    Reliability and observability

  • Incident handoff

    Incident handoff is a reliability concept used to describe a specific condition, control, or decision in the operation of software services.

    Reliability and observability

  • Incident impact assessment

    Incident impact assessment is a reliability concept used to describe a specific condition, control, or decision in the operation of software services.

    Reliability and observability

  • Incident recovery time

    Incident recovery time is a reliability concept used to describe a specific condition, control, or decision in the operation of software services.

    Reliability and observability

  • Incident reopen

    Incident reopen is a reliability concept used to describe a specific condition, control, or decision in the operation of software services.

    Reliability and observability

  • Incident response

    Incident response is the coordinated process of detecting, assessing, containing, communicating about, and recovering from an event that threatens a service or users. It includes the operational actions during the event and the learning work that follows.

    Reliability and observability

  • Incident response time

    Incident response time is a reliability concept used to describe a specific condition, control, or decision in the operation of software services.

    Reliability and observability

  • Incident severity

    Incident severity is a classification of the impact, urgency, and scope of a service incident. A severity level guides response priorities and communication; it is not a measure of personal fault.

    Reliability and observability

  • Incident severity matrix

    Incident severity matrix is a reliability concept used to describe a specific condition, control, or decision in the operation of software services.

    Reliability and observability

  • Incident stakeholder

    Incident stakeholder is a reliability concept used to describe a specific condition, control, or decision in the operation of software services.

    Reliability and observability

  • Incident status update

    Incident status update is a reliability concept used to describe a specific condition, control, or decision in the operation of software services.

    Reliability and observability

  • Infrastructure monitoring

    Infrastructure monitoring is observation of hosts, containers, networks, storage, and orchestration resources.

    Reliability and observability

  • Leader election

    Leader election is a reliability concept used to describe a specific condition, control, or decision in the operation of software services.

    Reliability and observability

  • Liveness probe

    Liveness probe is a test of whether a process should be restarted because it no longer functions at a basic level.

    Reliability and observability

  • Log enrichment

    Log enrichment is adding context to a log record such as service identity, deployment, or correlation fields.

    Reliability and observability

  • Log level

    Log level is a classification such as debug, info, warning, or error indicating intended operational importance.

    Reliability and observability

  • Log parsing

    Log parsing is conversion of raw log text or fields into a structured searchable representation.

    Reliability and observability

  • Log retention

    Log retention is the policy determining how long logs remain available and under what archive or deletion rules.

    Reliability and observability

  • Log signal

    Log signal is a timestamped record of an event or state transition emitted by software or infrastructure.

    Reliability and observability

  • Log-based alert

    Log-based alert is a trigger based on matching log patterns, counts, rates, or structured conditions.

    Reliability and observability

  • Memory pressure

    Memory pressure is a reliability concept used to describe a specific condition, control, or decision in the operation of software services.

    Reliability and observability

  • Metric histogram

    Metric histogram is a distribution representation that records observations in buckets or equivalent aggregates.

    Reliability and observability

  • Metric signal

    Metric signal is a numeric observation recorded over time, often aggregated by service, route, region, or status.

    Reliability and observability

  • Network partition

    Network partition is a reliability concept used to describe a specific condition, control, or decision in the operation of software services.

    Reliability and observability

  • Objective attainment

    Objective attainment is a reliability concept used to describe a specific condition, control, or decision in the operation of software services.

    Reliability and observability

  • Observability

    Observability is the ability to understand a system's internal behavior from the evidence it produces. In software systems, that evidence often includes logs, metrics, and traces connected to enough context to investigate unexpected behavior.

    Reliability and observability

  • Observability dashboard

    Observability dashboard is a view combining metrics, logs, traces, and context for a system question.

    Reliability and observability

  • Observability signal

    Observability signal is a recorded representation of system behavior that helps a team infer what is happening inside a service.

    Reliability and observability

  • OpenTelemetry

    OpenTelemetry is an open-source framework and specification set for generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry.

    Reliability and observability

  • OpenTelemetry Collector

    OpenTelemetry Collector is a vendor-neutral service that receives, processes, and exports telemetry.

    Reliability and observability

  • Operational toil

    Operational toil is recurring work needed to keep a service running that tends to be manual, tactical, automatable, and without lasting improvement. Its volume often grows with the service unless the underlying need is reduced.

    Reliability and observability

  • OTLP

    OTLP is the OpenTelemetry Protocol for transmitting telemetry between instrumented systems, collectors, and backends.

    Reliability and observability

  • Overload control

    Overload control is a reliability concept used to describe a specific condition, control, or decision in the operation of software services.

    Reliability and observability

  • Paging policy

    Paging policy is the rules defining which conditions warrant immediate human notification.

    Reliability and observability

  • Poison message

    Poison message is a reliability concept used to describe a specific condition, control, or decision in the operation of software services.

    Reliability and observability

  • Postmortem

    A postmortem is a written review of an incident that records what happened, how systems and people responded, what the impact was, and which improvements should follow. A blameless postmortem focuses on system conditions rather than individual fault.

    Reliability and observability

  • Queue backpressure

    Queue backpressure is a reliability concept used to describe a specific condition, control, or decision in the operation of software services.

    Reliability and observability

  • Queue drain

    Queue drain is a reliability concept used to describe a specific condition, control, or decision in the operation of software services.

    Reliability and observability