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visibility modifier - “A modifier added to function and property declarations to set their visibility.” (KtPgBNrd 2021)

TLDR: Visibility in software systems refers to the ability to monitor, understand, and analyze the state and behavior of applications, infrastructure, and services in real time. Gaining visibility is critical for maintaining performance, identifying issues, and ensuring reliability in distributed architectures like microservices and cloud-native systems. The concept gained prominence in the 2010s with the rise of observability platforms and DevOps practices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observability_(software)

Enhanced visibility allows teams to track key performance metrics such as latency, throughput, and error rates. Tools like Grafana and Datadog provide real-time dashboards, enabling teams to monitor application health and identify anomalies. For example, a spike in request latency visible on a dashboard can quickly lead to discovering overloaded API Endpoints or database contention.

https://grafana.com/

In security, visibility plays a crucial role in detecting and mitigating threats. By aggregating and analyzing logs, traces, and metrics from various components, tools like Splunk and Elastic Security provide insights into potential vulnerabilities or attacks. Greater visibility ensures that incidents are identified early, minimizing damage and reducing downtime.

https://www.elastic.co/security

Achieving comprehensive visibility requires integrating observability tools with frameworks like OpenTelemetry to collect and analyze telemetry data from distributed systems. Combining metrics, logs, and traces enables teams to correlate issues across services, ensuring faster debugging and proactive management. Visibility is foundational for delivering reliable and secure systems in modern software development.

https://opentelemetry.io/

Snippet from Wikipedia: Visibility

In meteorology, visibility is the measure of the distance at which an object or light can be clearly discerned. It depends on the transparency of the surrounding air and as such, it is unchanging no matter the ambient light level or time of day. It is reported within surface weather observations and METAR code either in meters or statute miles, depending upon the country. Visibility affects all forms of traffic: roads, railways, sailing and aviation.

The geometric range of vision is limited by the curvature of the Earth and depends on the eye level and the height of the object being viewed. In geodesy, the atmospheric refraction must be taken into account when calculating geodetic visibility.

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