Telemetry forms that expose system behaviour.

• Metrics: Numeric time-series showing performance trends.

• Logs: Structured events describing what happened.

• Traces: End-to-end request paths across components.

• Profiles: Continuous CPU/memory/runtime behaviour.

How telemetry is shaped, enriched, and made analyzable.

• Labels / Attributes: Dimensions for slicing signals.

• Cardinality: Unique label combinations; cost/performance impact.

• Histograms: Bucketed distributions enabling percentiles.

• Exemplars: Metric points linked to specific traces.

• Sampling: Reducing volume while preserving value.

• Enrichment: Adding context (tenant, region, feature flag).

How telemetry is generated.

• White-box instrumentation: Signals emitted from inside code.

• Black-box checks: External probes validating availability.

• eBPF: Kernel-level insights without code changes.

• Agents / Exporters / SDKs: Components collecting and forwarding telemetry.

Where telemetry lives and how it is aggregated.

• Time-series databases: Store metrics.

• Log stores: Index/search logs.

• Trace stores: Persist distributed traces.

• Retention strategies: Hot/warm/cold data lifecycle.

• Aggregations / transformations: Derived metrics, volume reduction.

• Pipelines: Stream/batch telemetry processing.

How signals are connected to explain behaviour.

• Correlation: Link metrics, logs, traces, deploy events.

• Service graphs: Auto-discovered dependency maps.

• Anomaly detection: Deviation from baseline.

• Drift detection: Missing or degraded telemetry.

• Noise reduction: Remove low-value signals.

How humans inspect telemetry.

• Dashboards: Visual summaries.

• Explorers / Queries: Ad-hoc inspection of all signal types.

• Heatmaps: Pattern and distribution visualization.

• Service maps: Visual dependency and flow mapping.

How telemetry triggers action.

• Alerts: Automated notifications.

• Threshold-based alerting: Static/dynamic limits.

• Statistical alerting: Baselines, anomalies.

• Multi-signal alerting: Combine metrics/logs/traces.

Ensuring telemetry is consistent and cost-efficient.

• Schemas: Structure and naming standards.

• Label budgets: Cardinality control.

• Cost governance: Ingestion/storage/retention management.

• Conventions: Standard rules for metrics/logs/traces.