Terminology

2185 terms, tools, patterns and metrics an architect is expected to use precisely. Each one gets a short explanation of what it is, and — where it matters — what it is commonly confused with. Search filters as you type; the column headers sort.

All areas2185 Architecture Fundamentals77 Distributed Systems107 Data Architecture110 Cloud Architecture89 Networking88 API & Integration Architecture82 Reliability & Resilience75 Observability70 Performance & Capacity Engineering72 Security Architecture81 Cost Architecture & FinOps66 Business Architecture67 Architecture Communication67 Enterprise Architecture66 Legacy Modernization66 AI-Era Architecture69 Software Architecture & Engineering71 Architecture Patterns71 Architecture Decision-Making63 The Architect's Meta-Skills61 Delivery & Release Engineering66 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience70 Testing & Quality Architecture66 Data Platform Architecture64 Streaming & Real-Time Data69 Data Governance & Semantics69 Frontend & Experience Architecture66 Edge, Mobile & IoT68 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture65 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk64

Kind Any concept785 practice729 pattern362 metric125 case-study77 tool62 protocol45

4 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Alert Actionability	metric	Alert Fatigue	The proportion of alerts that result in a human taking action, used as the primary quality measure of an alerting system.
Business Metrics	metric	Business Metrics	Measuring what the system exists to do — frequently the fastest and most reliable outage detector available.
Golden Signals	metric	Observability	The four measurements that cover most of what matters for a request-driven service: latency, traffic, errors and saturation.
Telemetry Pipeline Lag Ingestion Delay, Time to Queryable, Observability Freshness	metric	Observability	The delay between an event being emitted and being queryable, which bounds how quickly any decision made from telemetry can respond to reality.