Keeping your systems secure is a never-ending challenge. Not only is it necessary to monitor and secure your own tech stack, but each new service a company uses creates another potential avenue for bad actors to try to exploit for their own ends.

Forget the latest tech gadgets and the newest products. One of the most talked about trends in observability right now? “SLOs have really become a buzzword, and everyone wants them,” said Grafana Labs principal software engineer Björn “Beorn” Rabenstein on a recent episode of “Grafana’s Big Tent,” our new podcast about people, community, tech, and tools around observability.

Spring makes building a reliable application much easier thanks to its declarative transaction management. It also supports programmatic transaction management, but that’s not as common. In this article, I want to focus on the declarative transaction management angle, since it seems much harder to debug compared to the programmatic approach. This is partially true. We can’t put a breakpoint on a transactional annotation. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Ah, good question! TL;DR: Trace instead of log. Traces show connection, performance, concurrency, and causality. Logs are the original observability, right? Back in the day, I did all my debugging with `printf.` Sometimes I still write `console.log(“JESS WAS HERE”)` to see that my code ran. That’s instrumentation, technically. What if I emitted a “JESS WAS HERE” span instead? What’s so great about a span in a trace? Yeah, and so do logs in any decent framework.

You’ve likely heard the term Observability lately. There’s a fundamental change taking place in the Monitoring space, and Observability is behind it. Observability itself is a broad topic, so in this post we’ll talk about what it means to move from Application Performance Monitoring to Application Performance Observability.

The late 1990s were a crazy time in the technology industry. Apple converted a blueberry into a computer, Google still had a “new search engine” smell, and while Y2K loomed over our heads Napster was showing everyone how bad Metallica’s music sounded. Meanwhile, in a garage in Tulsa, Oklahoma, brothers Donald and David Yonce launched a network monitoring software company and named it SolarWinds.

I always tell people "Observability is not logs, metrics, and traces! Observability is empowering your team to ask questions." That's very aspirational and sounds good, but it's not at all clear. I now have a self-contained story that perfectly explains it!