Glossary
Data plane
The part of a system that carries the workload.
Definition
The data plane is the path that actually carries requests and responses: the network, the load balancers, the proxies, the workers that execute work and the storage that holds it. It is where latency, throughput and errors are observable, and it can be healthy while the control plane that directs it is not.
The problem
Monitoring almost always watches the data plane, because that is where the measurable signals are. The consequence is that control-plane failures are inferred from data-plane symptoms - usually as an unexplained drop in traffic - rather than detected directly.
Why it matters
Separating the two planes is what makes an incident attributable. "Requests are failing" and "no requests were issued" are different events with different causes, and only the second is a control-plane failure.
Practical example
A probe worker fleet that is running but has received no dispatch instructions shows a healthy data plane and zero observations. The correct reading is a control-plane failure; the data-plane-only reading is that nothing happened.
How RELIASTRA approaches it
RELIASTRA reports both sides separately: scheduler and worker health as control-plane state, and per-observation latency, status and outcome as data-plane evidence. The two are never merged into a single "system healthy" value.
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