Observability
The platforms teams use to monitor systems with metrics, logs, and traces — SaaS suites, open-source stacks, and the OpenTelemetry standard
Prepare for observability interview questions on structured logging, metrics collection, distributed tracing, alerting strategies, and monitoring platforms like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, and Datadog. Understand the three pillars of observability and how they work together.
Datadog
All-in-one SaaS
Unified metrics, traces, and logs behind one tag model and one query layer — the managed full-stack platform.
Prometheus
Open-source metrics
The CNCF standard for metrics — pull-based scraping, a label data model, and the PromQL query language.
Grafana (LGTM)
Visualize & open stack
Dashboards over any backend, plus Loki, Tempo, and Mimir for logs, traces, and scalable metrics.
New Relic
One telemetry DB
All MELT data in a single store (NRDB) queried by NRQL, with APM and applied intelligence.
Splunk
Machine data & SIEM
Index and search huge volumes of machine data with SPL, plus a streaming Observability Cloud.
Elastic (ELK)
Search-powered
Elasticsearch full-text search with Beats, Logstash, and Kibana — logs, metrics, and APM in one stack.
OpenTelemetry
Vendor-neutral standard
Instrument once and export anywhere — signals, semantic conventions, OTLP, and the Collector pipeline.
SolarWinds
Network & hybrid
Network Performance Monitor, Hybrid Cloud Observability, the SaaS platform, and Database Performance Analyzer.