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In the context of observability, which telemetry signal is primarily used to record events that occur within a system and are timestamped?
Logs are detailed, timestamped records of discrete events that occur within a system. They provide granular insight into what has happened, making them crucial for debugging, auditing, and incident investigations. Option A is correct because logs capture both normal and error events, often containing contextual information such as error codes, user IDs, or request payloads.
Option B (alerts) are secondary outputs generated from telemetry signals like logs or metrics and are not raw data themselves. Option C (traces) represent the flow of requests across distributed systems, showing relationships and latency between services but not arbitrary events. Option D (metrics) are numeric aggregates sampled over intervals (e.g., CPU usage, latency), not discrete, timestamped events.
Observability guidance in cloud native systems emphasizes the 'three pillars' of telemetry: logs, metrics, and traces. Logs are indispensable for root cause analysis and compliance because they preserve historical event context.
--- CNCF Observability Whitepaper
--- OpenTelemetry Documentation (aligned with CNCF)
--- Cloud Native Platform Engineering Study Guide