Glossary

A

• Alert

  An alert is a trigger that a specific change in a system's health has occurred, which indicates potential issues. An alert will result in a notification to the system operators so that they can take further actions to remediate or fix the issues.

• API

  Public methods and properties that are used to interact with Dash0’s objects; a set of REST endpoints used for retrieving and manipulating information.

• APM

  APM, or Application Performance monitoring, is a software tool that measures and tracks an application's performance. It helps understand answers related to how the application is performing in real time.

• AWS

  Amazon launched Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2006 to offer organizations a cloud computing platform on a “pay-as-you-go” basis. AWS is the world’s leading cloud provider. Dash0 offers an AWS integration.

• Azure

  Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform offering a wide range of services for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centers, which was launched in February 2010.

B

• Build

  A build refers to source code that has been converted into software artifacts that can be run on a computer. Because a project results in many builds, each build is tracked using its “build number.”

C

• Cloudtrail

  AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account by recording and logging all API activity and changes across your AWS infrastructure.

• CloudWatch

  AWS CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service that provides real-time monitoring of AWS resources and applications, allowing users to collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, and set alarms.

D

• Data lake

  Datalake is a single storage that stores different types of monitoring data, such as logs, metrics, traces, and events. Single storage allows for far more correlation than data stored at different places.

• DevOps

  DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development and operations to shorten the development life cycle and improve reliability. The idea behind the DevOps is to reduce silos between different teams and make software delivery faster via automation and collaboration.

• Downsampling

  Downsampling reduces the data points in a time series to make it more manageable without losing the essence. It can reduce the cost of storage and the performance of querying.

E

• Event

  An event is primarily a change event that can mean a pod restart, deployment, or configuration flag change. Events are important because they affect the system's state externally and can help correlate incidents with metrics, traces, and logs.

• Exporter

  An exporter is a component that collects and transforms metrics data from a specific system or format into a standardized format that can be consumed by monitoring systems.

I

• Integration

  The ability to understand how your application is working and behaving in production through telemetry data (logs, metrics, traces, wide events, etc.). It enables you detect, diagnose and resolve issues in your app before they impact your users and become problems.

L

• Log

  A log is traditionally one line of unstructured text that developers output from applications to comply with auditing or debugging requirements. Logs are considered structured when they adhere to a schema with easy to recognize fields. Log managment solutions are able to process large amounts of structured and unstructured logs and provide search and alerting capabilities.

O

• O11y

  O11y is a numeronym (shorthand) for "observability," where 11 represents the number of letters between 'o' and 'y'.

• Observability

  The ability to understand how your application is working and behaving in production through telemetry data (logs, metrics, traces, wide events, etc.). It enables you detect, diagnose and resolve issues in your app before they impact your users and become problems.

• OTLP

  The OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) specification describes the encoding, transport, and delivery mechanism of telemetry data between telemetry sources, intermediate nodes such as collectors and telemetry backends.

  OTLP is a general-purpose telemetry data delivery protocol designed in the scope of the OpenTelemetry project.

P

• PromQL

  PromQL (Prometheus Query Language) is a functional query language that lets users select and aggregate time series data in real-time, specifically designed for querying metrics in Prometheus, a popular open-source monitoring and alerting system.

S

• SLO

  Service Level Objectives (SLOs) are quantitative targets that define an acceptable level of service reliability and performance that a system should deliver to its users, providing clear and measurable standards for system quality. An important feature of SLOs are error budgets, which acknowledge the fact that not everything needs to always be working perfectly.

• Span

  A span represents a unit of work or operation. Spans are the building blocks of Traces. In OpenTelemetry, they include important information such as Name, Start and End as well as references to other Spans, especially the Parent Span, to build a visual, usually tree like, representation of cause and effect.

T

• Trace

  A trace is a group of Spans, in most cases a chronological sequence of cause and effect. They are usually displayed in waterfall graphs, which however has limitations for highly asynchronous interactions. The term Distributed Trace refers to a group of Spans that occurs on several systems. The trace is identified by its trace id, which is passed between systems as correlation identifier, for example following the W3C Trace context spec as HTTP header traceparentCopy