telemetry

Telemetry is the automated collection and transmission of measurements or event data from remote, inaccessible, or distributed systems to a receiving system, where the data is used for monitoring, analysis, and control.

In software engineering, telemetry refers to the operational data that applications emit to observability backends. It can include traces, metrics, logs, and related signals. This data is gathered by sensors or code-level instrumentation, carried via SDKs and exporters. Then, it’s analyzed to debug behavior, monitor performance and reliability, track usage and cost, and inform capacity planning.