Observability
The property that a system's internal state can be understood from the signals it emits — traces, metrics and logs — without modifying it to ask.
Why it matters
Applies to whoever must answer what the system did when something goes wrong. For an agent, observability is the raw material of auditability and is not the same thing: telemetry is retained for weeks and designed for debugging, while audit evidence is retained for years and designed for challenge. Firms that instrument for observability and assume they have satisfied audit discover the gap during an examination.
What it is not
These are routinely confused with Observability. The distinctions are not pedantic — each one has consequences for how a system is governed.
Monitoring watches for known conditions. Observability permits investigation of conditions nobody anticipated.
Observability answers what happened operationally. Auditability requires that the decision can be reconstructed, including model state.
Relationships
Typed edges into the rest of the ontology. These are what make the canon traversable rather than merely readable.
| Verb | Target | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
relatedTo | Audit Trail | An association too weak or too general for a stronger verb. |
dependsOn | OPENTELEMETRY | The subject cannot function correctly without the object. |
addresses | Auditability | The subject speaks to the object as a question or concern. |
Record
| Canonical identifier | QIS-TERM-00040 |
| Status | Canonical industry term |
| Adoption | Widely used |
| Domain · Layer | Stack categories · Intelligence |
| Origin | Distributed systems engineering; applied to AI systems from 2023. |
| Semantic aliases | None recorded. |
| First published | 2026-08-02 |
| Last reviewed | 2026-08-02 · 180-day cycle |
Cite the identifier, not the URL. Identifiers are stable; URLs may change. This entry is free to read, quote and index under the dual license. Corrections to [email protected] are published.