MELT stands for Metrics, Events, Logs, and Traces. It is a framework being used in SRE domain to achieve 360 degree view of the performance of any business system. Each element of MELT plays a crucial role.
Metrics
These are the samples of Key Performance Indicators like CPU, memory, storage utilizations. These are collected on different frequencies based on criticality of the system and presented as analytical dashboards with intuitive graphs. It provides high level overview of system health.
Events
Every metric has a permissible range of accepted values. Every breach of such metric is considered as an event. In addition, notable activity in the business systems such as a successful login, failed login, error in the process, server reboot, application restart, hang process are all considered as events.
Logs
One of the language used by the business systems to talk to SRE experts is the log files. They are textual representations of the process with timestamp and detailed information. Logs are helpful to troubleshoot issues and to identify anomalies.
Traces
Business systems are getting complex every day. When a user complains about a problem, SRE experts need a detailed records of how a request or transactions executed through out the business system. It has to collect critical steps such as the path it takes, the functions it calls, the remote connectivity it makes, the time it spent etc. Traces are invaluable for troubleshooting user experience problems in a complex IT system.
So MELT provides a comprehensive view of any business system using these four pillars – Metrics, Events, Logs, Traces.
MELT and Observability
While MELT is a framework or best practice to collect and analyze data for the business services monitoring, observability is a high level concept that refers to the ability to monitor the state of the business service and take proactive actions to ensure the site reliability.
MELT plays significant role on the technical data, where as observability is surrounded by understanding the status of business service. So MELT is an unavoidable tool to achieve observability.
Observability is about troubleshoot and attend the problems proactively, improve the performance by learning from the problems, achieve informed decisions. MELT provides the data point to achieve the same.
In a nutshell, MELT is a tool that helps us, the SRE engineers, to succeed in Observability.
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