# Telemetry **Domain:** Instrumentation / Operations / Control **Doc Type:** Canonical Technical Concept **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition **Telemetry** is the automated measurement and transmission of state for remote monitoring, analysis or control. ## Historical Lineage Remote measurement developed wherever the observed process was distant, inaccessible or too fast for direct inspection. Communications networks turned isolated instruments into continuous operational sensing systems. ## Governing Variable Telemetry governs visibility of selected state across distance and time. ## Material and Computational Manifestation Meters, sensors, event streams, timestamps, communications and storage create telemetry. In buildings and data centers it can include temperature, flow, pressure, power, breaker state, equipment alarms, optical condition and workload utilization. ## Relation to Governance Telemetry is not neutral completeness. Instrument choice determines which variables become visible to [[wiki/State Estimation|state estimation]], [[wiki/Observability|observability]] and higher control layers. [[wiki/State Legibility|State Legibility]] names the administrative consequence when selected measurements become authoritative. ## Constitutional Question and Failure Modes Continuous sensing is surveillance at the technical layer and can support safety, maintenance, coordination or control. Failure modes include missing context, drift, time misalignment, silent gaps, metric fixation, asymmetric access to the model and the assumption that what is not measured does not exist. ## Related Ontology [[wiki/Sensing Infrastructure|Sensing Infrastructure]] · [[wiki/Surveillance|Surveillance]] · [[wiki/Information Asymmetry|Information Asymmetry]] · [[wiki/Observability|Observability]] · [[wiki/State Estimation|State Estimation]] · [[wiki/Control Loop|Control Loop]] · [[wiki/Operational Representation|Operational Representation]]