Matt Yonkovit is Percona’s chief experience officer and a member of SHA (Silly Hats Anonymous).
Observability comes from control theory and means that you should be able to determine or infer a system’s state by its output. For some setups, this can involve using strace and grepping through logs, but the number of machines that DBA’s are dealing with is exploding, and finding failure points is often like finding a needle in a data haystack.