June 2026
Intermediate to advanced
632 pages
19h 5m
English
Content preview from Observability Engineering, 2nd Edition
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Chapter 3. The Origins of Observability in Software
In Chapter 1, we described observability as a property of system dependability and the sense-making capability of complex systems. In Chapter 2, we talked about how code crosses over from development to production, and how to safely test in prod.
This chapter is written by Charity Majors, in her voice and perspective.
It shares her retrospective on how observability entered the software industry, and how it has changed over time. The popular understanding has diverged from the specific, technical meaning it once had. This chapter is about recovering that meaning, and reasserting the principles that matter most.
If you want to get straight to instrumentation and the practical bits, you have Charity’s blessing to skip ahead.
An Introduction from Charity
Hi! My name is Charity, and I am the cofounder and CTO of Honeycomb. I come from the infrastructure side of the house; I have been an operations engineer, site reliability engineer (SRE), and database reliability engineer, working on systems like Linden Lab, Parse, and Facebook, as both engineer and manager.
For 10 years now, I’ve had a front row seat to the industry’s attempts to make sense of our complex, confusing, interdependent web of software, and I’ve contributed some attempts of my own. It’s a bit ironic, because as an engineer I always hated monitoring and dashboards, but I am no stranger to rage-driven development (it’s actually kind of my thing), and I feel really ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.