Charity Majors, honeycomb.io
Pillars, cardinality, metrics, dashboards ... the definition of observability has been debated to death, and I'm done with it. Let's just say that observability is a property of complex systems, just like reliability or performance. This definition feels both useful and true, and I am 100% behind it.
However, there has recently been a generational sea change in data types, usability, workflows, and cost models, along with what users report is a massive, discontinuous leap in value. In the parlance of semantic versioning, it is a breaking, backwards-incompatible change. Which means it’s time to bump the major version number. Observability 1.0, meet Observability 2.0.
In this presentation, we will outline the technical and sociotechnical characteristics of each generation of tooling and describe concrete steps you can take to advance or improve. These changes are being driven by the relentless increase in complexity of our systems, and none of us can afford to ignore them.
Charity Majors, Honeycomb.io
Charity is the cofounder and CTO of honeycomb.io, the O.G. observability company, and the coauthor of O'Reilly books "Database Reliability Engineering" and "Observability Engineering". She writes about tech, leadership and other random stuff at https://charity.wtf.
author = {Charity Majors},
title = {Is It Already Time To Version Observability? (Signs Point To Yes.)},
year = {2024},
address = {San Francisco, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}