Observability Engineering

Observability is critical for building, changing, and understanding the software that powers complex modern systems. Teams that adopt observability are much better equipped to ship code swiftly and confidently, identify outliers and aberrant behaviors, and understand the experience of each and every user. This practical book explains the value of observable systems and shows you how to practice observability-driven development.

Authors Charity Majors, Liz Fong-Jones, and George Miranda from Honeycomb explain what constitutes good observability, show you how to improve upon what you’re doing today, and provide practical dos and don’ts for migrating from legacy tooling, such as metrics, monitoring, and log management. You’ll also learn the impact observability has on organizational culture (and vice versa).

You’ll explore:

• How the concept of observability applies to managing software at scale
• The value of practicing observability when delivering complex cloud native applications and systems
• The impact observability has across the entire software development lifecycle
• How and why different functional teams use observability with service-level objectives
• How to instrument your code to help future engineers understand the code you wrote today
• How to produce quality code for context-aware system debugging and maintenance
• How data-rich analytics can help you debug elusive issues

Thank you for picking up our book on observability engineering for modern software systems. Our goal is to help you develop a practice of observability within your engineering organization. This book is based on our experience as practitioners of observability, and as makers of observability tooling for users who want to improve their own observability practices.

As outspoken advocates for driving observability practices in software engineering, our hope is that this book can set a clear record of what observability means in the context of modern software systems. The term “observability” has seen quite a bit of recent uptake in the software development ecosystem.

This book aims to help you separate facts from hype by providing a deep analysis of the following:

• What observability means in the context of software delivery and operations
• How to build the fundamental components that help you achieve observability
• The impact observability has on team dynamics
• Considerations for observability at scale
• Practical ways to build a culture of observability in your organization

Who This Book Is For

Observability predominantly focuses on achieving a better understanding of the way software operates in the real world. Therefore, this book is most useful for software engineers responsible for developing production applications. However, anyone who supports the operation of software in production will also greatly benefit from the content in this book.

Additionally, managers of software delivery and operations teams who are interested in understanding how the practice of observability can benefit their organization will find value in this book, particularly in the chapters that focus on team dynamics, culture, and scale.

Anyone who helps teams deliver and operate production software (for example, product managers, support engineers, and stakeholders) and is curious about this new thing called “observability” and why people are talking about it should also find this book useful.

About the Author

Charity Majors is a cofounder and engineer at Honeycomb.io, a startup that blends the speed of time series with the raw power of rich events to give you interactive, iterative debugging for complex systems. She has worked at companies like Facebook, Parse, and Linden Lab, as a systems engineer and engineering manager, but always seems to end up responsible for the databases too.

Liz Fong-Jones is a developer advocate, labor and ethics organizer, and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with 15+ years of experience. She is an advocate at Honeycomb.io for the SRE and Observability communities, and previously was an SRE working on products ranging from the Google Cloud Load Balancer to Google Flights.

George Miranda is a former engineer turned product marketer at Honeycomb.io. He spent 15+ years building large scale distributed systems in the finance and video game industries. He discovered his knack for storytelling and now works to shape the tools, practices, and culture that help improve the lives of people responsible for managing production systems.