This chapter discusses the core analysis loop in observability engineering, including loading data, narrowing down search results, correlating, and iterating until finding triggers. It also explores the concepts of cardinality and dimensionality in observability, emphasizing their importance for effective data analysis.
“Observability is a technique for ensuring that you can understand novel problems in your system. Can you understand what’s happening in your system and why, without having to push a new code by slicing and dicing existing telemetry signals that are coming out of your system?"
Liz Fong-Jones is the co-author of the “Observability Engineering” book and a Principal Developer Advocate for SRE and Observability at Honeycomb. In this episode, Liz shared in-depth about observability and why it is becoming an important practice in the industry nowadays. Liz started by explaining the fundamentals of observability and how it differs from traditional monitoring. She explained some important concepts, such as the core analysis loop, cardinality and dimensionality, and doing debugging from a first principle. Later, Liz shared the current state of observability and how we can improve our observability by doing observability driven development and improving our practices based on the proposed observability maturity model found in the book.
Listen out for:
- Career Journey - [00:05:44]
- Observability - [00:06:30]
- Pillars of Observability - [00:09:57]
- Monitoring and SLO - [00:12:28]
- Core Analysis Loop - [00:15:06]
- Cardinality and Dimensionality - [00:18:41]
- Debugging from First Principle - [00:21:20]
- Current State of Observability - [00:26:49]
- Implementing Observability - [00:30:20]
- Observability Driven Development - [00:36:53]
- Having Developers On-Call - [00:39:06]
- Observability Maturity Model - [00:41:59]
- 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:44:10]
_____
Liz Fong-Jones’s Bio
Liz is a developer advocate, labor and ethics organizer, and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with 17+ years of experience. She is an advocate at Honeycomb for the SRE and Observability communities, and previously was an SRE working on products ranging from the Google Cloud Load Balancer to Google Flights. She lives in Vancouver, BC with her wife Elly, partners, and a Samoyed/Golden Retriever mix, and in Sydney, NSW. She plays classical piano, leads an EVE Online alliance, and advocates for transgender rights.
Follow Liz:
- Twitter – @lizthegrey
- LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/efong/
- Website – https://www.lizthegrey.com/
- GitHub – https://github.com/lizthegrey
Our Sponsor
Today’s episode is proudly sponsored by Skills Matter, the global community and events platform for software professionals.
Skills Matter is an easier way for technologists to grow their careers by connecting you and your peers with the best-in-class tech industry experts and communities. You get on-demand access to their latest content, thought leadership insights as well as the exciting schedule of tech events running across all time zones.
Head on over to skillsmatter.com to become part of the tech community that matters most to you - it’s free to join and easy to keep up with the latest tech trends.
Like this episode?
Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback.
Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.
Pledge your support by becoming a patron.
For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/88.
