---
title: "Observability"
source: Microsoft Code-With Engineering Playbook
source_url: https://github.com/microsoft/code-with-engineering-playbook
licence: CC-BY-4.0
domain: engineering
subdomain: microsoft-code-with-playbook
date_added: 2026-04-25
---

# Observability

Building observable systems enables development teams at ISE to measure how well the application is behaving. Observability serves the following goals:

- Provide holistic view of the _application health_.
- Help measure _business performance_ for the customer.
- Measure _operational performance_ of the system.
- Identify and _diagnose failures_ to get to the problem fast.

## Pillars of Observability

- [Logs](./pillars/logging.md)
- [Metrics](./pillars/metrics.md)
- [Tracing](./pillars/tracing.md)
- [Logs vs Metrics vs Traces](./log-vs-metric-vs-trace.md)

## Insights

- [Dashboards and Reporting](./pillars/dashboard.md)

## Tools, Patterns and Recommended Practices

- [Tooling and Patterns](./tools/README.md)
- [Observability As Code](./observability-as-code.md)
- [Recommended Practices](./best-practices.md)
- [Diagnostics tools](./diagnostic-tools.md)
- [OpenTelemetry](./tools/OpenTelemetry.md)

## Facets of Observability

- [Observability for Microservices](./microservices.md)
- [Observability in Machine Learning](./ml-observability.md)
- [Observability of CI/CD Pipelines](./observability-pipelines.md)
- [Observability in Azure Databricks](./observability-databricks.md)
- [Recipes](./recipes-observability.md)

## Resources

- [Non-Functional Requirements Guidance](../design/design-patterns/non-functional-requirements-capture-guide.md)
