Observability Engineering, 2nd Edition

Chapter 28. The Organizational Shift

This chapter is contributed by Rick Clark, Global Head of Cloud Advisory at UST.

A Note from Charity, Liz, George, and Austin

In the previous chapter, we looked at strategies for diagnosing your observability investment.

If finance is pressuring you to justify your spending on observability, that’s not a bad thing. Constraints are healthy. If your observability spend is a good investment, you should be able to see results. If it’s not a good investment, you want to know this so you can make a change.

The rest of this chapter is written from Rick Clark’s perspective.

You’ve invested in observability. Dashboards are everywhere. All three pillars, checked: metrics, logs, traces. You’ve paid your vendors and staffed your teams. But when you look at your organization, the reality doesn’t match the promise.

War rooms still happen. Correlation is still manual. Engineers ship code and have no idea if it works. You never deploy on Fridays. When something breaks, the same three people get pulled in because nobody else can figure out the tools. Customers discover bugs before you do. Mysteries persist so long that they become folklore.

You spent millions. You hired and trained all the people. Your dashboards proudly display green. Why?

Here is the uncomfortable truth: you have legacy observability masquerading as modern observability. You bought “observability” tools. You renamed teams from “monitoring” to “observability.” But the outcomes have not ...