Observability Engineering

Chapter 1. What Is Observability?

In the software development industry, the subject of observability has garnered a lot of interest and is frequently found in lists of hot new topics. But, as things seem to inevitably go when a hot new topic sees a surging level of interest in adoption, complex ideas become all too ripe for misunderstanding without a deeper look at the many nuances encapsulated by a simple topical label. This chapter looks at the mathematical origins of the term “observability” and examines how software development practitioners adapted it to describe characteristics of production software systems.

We also look at why the adaptation of observability for use in production software systems is necessary. Traditional practices for debugging the internal state of software applications were designed for legacy systems that were much simpler than those we typically manage today. As systems architecture, infrastructure platforms, and user expectations have continued to evolve, the tools we use to reason about those components have not. By and large, the debugging practices developed decades ago with nascent monitoring tools are still the same as those used by many engineering teams today—even though the systems they manage are infinitely more complex. Observability tools were born out of sheer necessity, when traditional tools and debugging methods simply were not up to the task of quickly finding deeply hidden and elusive problems.

This chapter will help you understand ...