Observability Engineering

Part I. The Path to Observability

This section defines concepts that are referenced throughout the rest of this book. You will learn what observability is, how to identify an observable system, and why observability-based debugging techniques are better suited for managing modern software systems than monitoring-based debugging techniques.

Chapter 1 examines the roots of the term “observability,” shows how that concept has been adapted for use in software systems, and provides concrete questions you can ask yourself to determine if you have an observable system.

Chapter 2 looks at the practices engineers use to triage and locate sources of issues using traditional monitoring methods. Those methods are then contrasted with methods used in observability-based systems. This chapter describes these methods at a high level, but the technical and workflow implementations will become more concrete in Part II.

Chapter 3 is a case study written by coauthor Charity Majors and told from her perspective. This chapter brings concepts from the first two chapters into a practical case study illustrating when and why the shift toward observability becomes absolutely necessary.

Chapter 4 illustrates how and why industry trends have helped popularize the need for observability and how that fits into emerging spaces, like the cloud native ecosystem.