Observability
Observability is the ability to understand what is happening inside a system by examining the data it produces, such as metrics, logs, traces, and events. It is what lets teams detect, investigate, and resolve issues in complex software.
Observability versus monitoring
Monitoring tells you when something is wrong. Observability helps you understand why. The difference matters in modern distributed systems, where a single user request might pass through dozens of services and the cause of a problem is rarely obvious.
Good observability means you can ask new questions of your system without shipping new code to answer them. That requires keeping enough detail, at enough resolution, for long enough, across all your telemetry types. The usual obstacle is cost: observability vendors charge by volume, so teams cut retention and detail to control the bill.
The result is that the data you need to debug an incident is often exactly the data you dropped to save money.
How Arc handles Observability
Arc gives teams an affordable place to keep observability data at full resolution. Because storage is compressed Parquet you own, you can retain metrics, logs, and traces longer without the per-host or per-gigabyte pricing that forces teams to cut back.
Related terms
Arc is a high-performance columnar database. Open Parquet on storage you own, single Go binary, production-ready in 30 seconds.