Base120 · Systems
Measurement & Telemetry
Instrument systems to capture state, changes, and anomalies for informed response
When to use
"Use when a system's behavior must be understood and managed. Instrument the system to capture state, changes, and anomalies. Without telemetry, the system is opaque — problems cannot be diagnosed, performance cannot be optimized."
Example
"A microservice has logging, metrics, and tracing. When latency spikes, the team can trace the request through all services, identify the bottleneck, and fix it. Without telemetry, the spike is invisible until a user complains, and the root cause is untraceable."
Common misuse
"Instrumenting everything and drowning in data. Telemetry should be purposeful — instrument what you need to understand and manage the system. Instrumenting everything creates noise that hides signal."