Observability Engineering

Chapter 10. Applying Observability Practices in Your Team

Let’s switch gears to focus on the fundamentals of observability from a social and cultural practice perspective. In this chapter, we provide several tips to help you get started with observability practices. If you’re in a leadership role within your engineering team—such as a team lead, a manager, or maybe the resident observability fan/champion—the hardest thing to figure out (after getting management approval) in an observability implementation strategy is knowing where to start.

For us, this is a particularly tricky chapter to write. Having helped many teams start down this path, we know that no universal recipe for success exists. How and where you get started will always depend on many factors. As unsatisfying as “it depends” can be for an answer, the truth is that your journey with observability depends on particulars including the problems most pertinent to you and your team, the gaps in your existing tooling, the level of support and buy-in from the rest of your organization, the size of your team, and other such considerations.

Whatever approach works best for you is, by definition, not wrong. The advice in this chapter is not intended to suggest that this is the one true way to get started with observability (there is no singular path!). That said, we have seen a few emergent patterns and, if you are struggling with where to begin, some of these suggestions may be helpful to you. Feel free to pick and choose ...