The observability of a system is its capability to be observed. This observability requires on the part of the system: capability for introspection and capability to report.
The qualities of observability of a system are qualities that are highly prized and used in the most modern methods of systems management – think SRE for example.
Observability relies on three sinequa non pillars: events logging, metrics logging (monitoring) and traces logging (tracing).
Events Logging
An events log is an immutable, timestamped record of discrete events that happened over time.
These events have a severity indicator, an explanation and a code. Many systems generating events enrich them with contextual information.
Monitoring
Metrics are a numeric representation of data measured over intervals of time or for each request.
Tracing
A trace is a representation of a series of causally related events that encode the end-to-end request flow through a system.
Traces are hierarchical list of spans which are timestamped descriptions of sub-processes.
And what about WordPress?
It is an unfortunately true fact: WordPress has little no quality of observability.
That’s why DecaLog was designed…
DecaLog captures events generated by WordPress core, PHP, database, plugins and themes, collates metrics and KPIs and follows traces of the full WordPress execution. It brings observability to WordPress – finally!