Observability is the practice of understanding the internal state of a software system — including a WordPress site — by analyzing the data the system produces: logs (structured records of events), metrics (numeric measurements over time like PHP error rates, response times, and memory usage), and traces (detailed records of how a single request flows through the application stack). For WordPress site operators, observability means having dashboards that surface PHP error rates, database query performance, HTTP status code distributions, cache hit rates, and queue depths — not just uptime. Tools providing WordPress-compatible observability include New Relic, Datadog, Grafana, and WP Engine's built-in Application Performance Monitor (APM) which shows per-query performance without requiring third-party instrumentation. Observability enables proactive operations: detecting a slow query or elevated 500 error rate before it causes user-facing page timeouts, rather than reacting after users report problems.
Glossary entry
