Observability is a term that has been thrown around a lot in the past few years in the software development industry. Different people use it in different ways, but one thing that is clear is that it attempts to provide a solution to a real pain engineers are feeling. It is the pain of not knowing what is happening in the microservices architecture and how and why systems are behaving in production.

Applications are increasingly switching from the traditional monolithic design to a modern microservices-based design with several operational benefits. However, it also introduces challenges as conventional methods for collecting metrics and logs become ineffective due to the application design’s distributed nature.

Microservices architecture has become the new norm for modern applications due to its numerous advantages compared to traditional monolithic architecture. However, microservices also come with several challenges. Especially when it comes to observability, traditional monitoring tools and techniques can no longer handle microservices’ distributed and dynamic nature.

Python app monitoring and debugging can be challenging. Using distributed tracing and OpenTelemetry visualization minimizes MTTR and improves developer experience, as seen in this article.