Release It!, 2nd Edition

Chapter 7Foundations

In the last chapter, the operations team, my client, and I narrowly avoided a financial disaster. It was a difficult situation, and the “solution” was not exactly ideal. All of us would have been happier if it’d never happened. My team couldn’t fix the underlying problem—the delivery scheduling servers were outside our control. But I was able to diagnose the problem, and the operations center partially mitigated its effects. That was only possible because we already had good visibility into the running system. There certainly wasn’t time to add a bunch of logging calls inside the application. With runtime visibility, though, new logging wasn’t necessary. The applications revealed their problems. To apply the solution, we ...