Telemetry

Definition

Telemetry is the automated process of collecting, transmitting, and recording data from remote systems. In software engineering, telemetry refers to the signals — logs, metrics, traces, and events — that applications and infrastructure emit to describe their behaviour.

In depth

The term comes from the Greek 'tele' (remote) + 'metron' (measure), originally used in aerospace and industrial monitoring. In modern distributed systems, telemetry is the raw material of observability: without rich, correlated telemetry, engineers cannot understand what a system is doing or why it is behaving unexpectedly. The OpenTelemetry project provides vendor-neutral APIs, SDKs, and the Collector to standardise how applications emit telemetry. The three primary telemetry signal types — traces, metrics, and logs — each answer different questions: traces show 'what happened and why', metrics show 'how much and how fast', and logs provide 'exact recorded events'. obseria.io ingests all telemetry signal types through a unified OTLP endpoint.

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