4 ms·

I think your definition of observability sits on top of the other two (Control & Cognitive definitions) and ultimately is more of a description of an approach t

I think your definition of observability sits on top of the other two (Control & Cognitive definitions) and ultimately is more of a description of an approach to observability rather than a redefinition of it. Observability is hard and I agree with the approach you've laid out, especially on the involvement of leadership insight. It's crucial and it has been omitted or ignored while working on this for a decade. The tooling improves but the same organisational problems persist. And there's an over reliance on hyper-competent people to get this working well than on an agreed set of practices that help offset the average competency that exists in most places. Don't get me wrong we need competent people but I find that when they leave so do the good practices. Redefining it is not going to do much since these are organisational, cultural problems which all happen to be the issues that hobbled DevOps and the SRE movements and we all know how those movements turned out - they never matured into any of the promises they made.

IneffablePigeon 3y ago
I think I agree to some extent. I like parts of all 3 definitions presented here, and I feel the new definition loses some of the clarity by omitting the fact that we’re interested in a particular system at a time. But I really like this blog post’s main thesis that the people are part of the system and a key part of your observability stack. You can have an objectively perfectly observable system that outputs all of its answers to your questions in Greek, and I won’t be able to make head nor tail of it and neither will pretty much any of my team. Just as nines don’t matter if the users aren’t happy, observability doesn’t matter if the team can’t understand and act on the answers. I have spent the last year building out observability tooling and I expect to spend another year on it. I would say 70% of my problems to solve are social rather than technical.
- vergessenmir 3y ago
  A 100% agree. I've built so many of these solutions over the years and haven't quite cracked the culture problem

IneffablePigeon 3y ago

I think I agree to some extent. I like parts of all 3 definitions presented here, and I feel the new definition loses some of the clarity by omitting the fact that we’re interested in a particular system at a time. But I really like this blog post’s main thesis that the people are part of the system and a key part of your observability stack. You can have an objectively perfectly observable system that outputs all of its answers to your questions in Greek, and I won’t be able to make head nor tail of it and neither will pretty much any of my team. Just as nines don’t matter if the users aren’t happy, observability doesn’t matter if the team can’t understand and act on the answers. I have spent the last year building out observability tooling and I expect to spend another year on it. I would say 70% of my problems to solve are social rather than technical.

vergessenmir 3y ago
A 100% agree. I've built so many of these solutions over the years and haven't quite cracked the culture problem