The latest News and Information on Observabilty for complex systems and related technologies.
Insights from the 2022 Results That Matter study Correlating data across multiple silos and applications to derive meaningful and actionable insights is an ongoing struggle. These challenges are only set to increase as high-speed connectivity becomes more ubiquitous and enables data-heavy, digital experiences.
At Honeycomb, we love involving our customers when we can. We asked: “What was the first thing you found value from with Honeycomb?” Here are some of our favorite answers.
API Observability isn't exactly new, however it's popularity has seen rapid growth in the past few years in terms of popularity. API Observability using open source is different from regular API monitoring, as it allows you to get deeper and extract more valuable insights. Although it takes a bit more effort to set up, once you've got an observability infrastructure running it can be immensely helpful not only in catching errors and making debugging easier, but also in finding areas that can be optimized.
Since 2013, Monitorama has been a community-driven conference, bringing together open source development and operations engineers to focus on pushing the boundaries of monitoring software and practices. It’s chock full of thought-provoking content in the conference talks. The casual atmosphere also makes the hallway track a great way to network with fellow engineers and vendors alike to pick up on new developments in the monitoring space.
We’ve all grown used to logs, metrics and traces serving as the “three pillars of observability.” And indeed they are very important telemetry signals. But are they indeed the sum of the observability game? Not at all. In fact, one of the key trends in observability is moving beyond the ‘three pillars: One emerging telemetry type shows a particularly interesting potential for observability: Continuous Profiling.
It is only possible to come to an understanding of a system of interest by trying to change it. Here, Jackson contrasts action research with old-style hard science, which tries to study a system from the outside. Laboratories draw a line between experiment and scientist. In the social world, there is no outside: we participate in the systems we study. I’ve noticed this in code: when I come to an existing codebase, I get a handle on it by changing stuff.
When I speak at conferences, I often fall back to the fact that just a couple of decades ago we’d observe production by kicking the server. This is obviously no longer practical. We can’t see our production. It’s an amorphous cloud that we can’t touch or feel. A power that we read about but don’t fully grasp. In this case, we have physical evidence that the cloud is there. A part of this major shift in our industry is a change to our fundamental roles as engineers.
Sometimes the simplest questions prompt the most spirited discussion. Questions like: What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? What should we have for dinner tonight? Or, as we find out in this episode of “Grafana’s Big Tent" what even is observability?
