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The Pragmatic Engineer
Observability: the present and future, with Charity Majors
Jan 22, 2025
Charity Majors, co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb and observability expert, shares her insights on the evolving landscape of observability. She discusses the concept of Observability 2.0, emphasizing the shift to unified storage and the critical role of platform teams. Charity critiques the overloaded term DevOps, explains the impact of cardinality on observability costs, and highlights how OpenTelemetry mitigates vendor lock-in. She argues for the necessity of strong observability before integrating AI code, making a compelling case for its importance in modern software engineering.
01:14:25
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Quick takeaways
- Observability is evolving from a fragmented approach to a unified storage model, enhancing data correlation and reducing costs.
- The integration of observability tools in the development process is crucial for accurate issue diagnosis and operational efficiency.
Deep dives
Understanding the Three Pillars of Observability
Observability is fundamentally structured around three key pillars: metrics, logs, and traces. While these concepts originate from an attempt to categorize observability tools, they can be misleading as they promote a fragmented approach to data management. Historically, each request that enters a system could be recorded in multiple ways, leading to an overwhelming amount of data stored across various platforms. Consequently, engineers often struggle to connect these disparate data points, which increases costs and complicates the task of correlating information effectively.
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