The topic of “observability” has been getting much attention recently, particularly in relation to building and operating “cloud native” systems. Several thought-leaders within this space like Cindy Sridharan have mused that observability could simply be a re-packaging of the age-old topic of monitoring (and argued that no amount of “observability” or “monitoring” tooling can ever be a substitute to good engineering intuition and instincts). Others, like Charity Majors have looked back at the roots of the term, which was taken from control theory and corresponds to a measure of how well internal states of a system can be inferred from knowledge of its external outputs. Both Sridharan and Majors discuss that the implementation of an observable systems should enable engineers to ask ad hoc (or following an incident, post hoc) questions about how the software works during execution.
This eMag explores the topic of observability in-depth, covering the role of the “three pillars of observability” -- monitoring, logging, and distributed tracing -- and relates these topics to designing and operating software systems based around modern architectural styles like microservices and serverless.
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Observability eMag includes:
- Practical Monitoring: Book Review and Q&A with Mike Julian
- The Value of Logging Within Cloud-Native Applications: Q&A with Kresten Krab
- Distributed Tracing: Exploring the Past, Present and Future with Dapper, Zipkin and LightStep [x]PM
- Charity Majors on Observability and Understanding the Operational Rami cations of a System
- Observability and Avoiding Alert Overload from Microservices at the Financial Times
- Uwe Friedrichsen on Functional Service Design and Observabilityfrom Microservices at the Financial Times
- Debugging Distributed Systems: Q&A with the “Squash” Microservice Debugger Creator Idit Levine
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