Observability
February 2024
Evaluating the health of a digital ecosystem becomes more and more complex as it expands in scale and complexity. The challenges multiply, making it imperative to adopt a proactive approach to observability.
Observability refers to the ability to understand and gain insights into the system’s internal workings by analyzing its external outputs.
By embracing observability early in the development and scaling phases, organizations can establish a robust framework for monitoring and analyzing their digital infrastructure.
With that in mind, let’s get on with it!
The quotes of all quotes
It’s all about empowering the developer to ask any arbitrary question of their system from the outside, without having to predict it in advance, without shipping new code
This is an amazing quote. It has everything, career growth, a proactive mindset, discovery, stability. Let’s analyse it in a bit more detail:
Empowering the developer
Developer experience (DX), a subset of employee experience, is key to keep your team motivated, proactive, and engaged. The best way to achieve those goals is by empowering your team. That’s the root of agile development, that’s the key to startups, that’s the key to happiness at work.
Although there are many ways to improve DX, having great observability of your ecosystem is one of the simplest to achieve. If you use OpenTelemetry, it’s just a matter of adding some libraries and some configuration. You can have observability in 5 minutes. Amazing.
That’s all good but, why does observability empower the developer?
Ask questions from the outside
Systems are more complex each day. Distributed systems are more common than ever, and that makes it more and more difficult to predict how a change in one system might impact others. That’s why having the ability to explore your systems from the outside is really helpful.
Observability allows you to understand and check your systems in real-time. It helps you ask questions and solve problems that you didn’t expect. This capability lets you explore your systems and learn how they work, providing useful insights into how they behave and interact.
That’s really powerful. You can gain insights that you couldn’t predict beforehand, while answering the questions you could predict.
Without shipping new code
The cherry on top. You don’t need to ship new code to gain all this power. The vision of OpenTelemetry allows this. With auto instrumentation you get all the information about your system without having to ship new code, without the possibility of adding new bugs.
In summary, observability is just a win! There are no cons, except cost. It will save you more money that you will spend on it though!
That’s all!