Terminology

342 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 areas342 Architecture Fundamentals16 Distributed Systems73 Data Architecture29 Cloud Architecture17 Networking13 API & Integration Architecture17 Reliability & Resilience16 Observability14 Performance & Capacity Engineering13 Security Architecture18 Cost Architecture & FinOps12 Business Architecture9 Architecture Communication8 Enterprise Architecture8 Legacy Modernization11 AI-Era Architecture15 Software Architecture & Engineering19 Architecture Patterns15 Architecture Decision-Making11 The Architect's Meta-Skills8

Kind Any concept119 practice84 pattern70 case-study26 protocol18 tool14 metric11

14 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Alert Fatigue	concept	Observability	The desensitisation that follows from alerts that are frequent, non-actionable, or not tied to user impact — after which real alerts are missed too.
Application Performance Monitoring APM	tool	Observability	Instrumentation inside the application that attributes latency and errors to specific code paths, queries and dependencies.
Burn Rate Alerting	practice	SLO Monitoring	Paging when the error budget is being consumed fast enough to matter, rather than when a component crosses a threshold.
Cardinality	concept	Observability	The number of distinct time series produced by a metric, which is the product of the distinct values of all its labels — and the main driver of monitoring cost.
Correlation ID	practice	Observability	A single identifier attached to one logical operation and included in every log line it produces, anywhere in the system.
Distributed Tracing	tool	Observability	Following one logical request across every service it touches by propagating a shared trace identifier and recording timed spans.
Golden Signals	metric	Observability	The four measurements that cover most of what matters for a request-driven service: latency, traffic, errors and saturation.
Health Check	practice	Observability	An endpoint the platform polls to decide whether an instance should be restarted or should receive traffic — two different questions needing two different checks.
Observability	concept	Observability	The property of being able to answer new questions about a system's internal state from its external outputs, without shipping new code.
RED Method	practice	Observability	A minimal per-service dashboard: Rate, Errors, Duration — the request-centric view of whether users are being served.
Runbook Playbook	practice	Observability	A short, actionable document telling an on-call engineer what an alert means, what to check, and what the safe mitigations are.
Structured Logging	practice	Observability	Emitting log entries as machine-parseable key-value records rather than as formatted prose.
Telemetry Sampling	practice	Observability	Keeping a subset of traces or events to bound observability cost, chosen so the ones that matter survive.
USE Method	practice	Observability	For every resource, track Utilisation, Saturation and Errors — the resource-centric complement to request-centric monitoring.