Telemetry Signals

Telemetry is data emitted to observe a system’s behavior. Logs describe individual events, metrics describe measured quantities over time, and traces represent operations as linked spans. A collector receives and forwards these signals; it is not itself the search, storage, and analysis backend.

For one failed checkout, an error log may explain the failure, a latency metric may show whether many requests slowed down, and a trace may locate the slow operation. Connect them using service identity, instance, deployment version, and supplied trace and span IDs. A collector cannot reconstruct instrumentation that never emitted the needed context.

A request or trace can contain many log events, so its ID is not a general deduplication key for logs. Occurrence time and observation time can also differ. State the signal, timestamp, sampling or drop policy, and identity before interpreting missing or repeated records.

Reference: Log and telemetry collection lab.