The Pragmatic Engineer Observability: the present and future, with Charity Majors
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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.
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Parse and Scuba
- Charity Majors' observability journey began at Parse, where unpredictable traffic from mobile apps caused frequent outages.
- Access to Facebook's Scuba tool, after Parse's acquisition, significantly improved debugging speed and reduced downtime.
Observability Defined
- Observability is about understanding the intersection of code, systems, and users, going beyond just errors and bugs.
- It helps understand the impact of software on the world, making it crucial for development feedback loops and product understanding.
Observability's Business Value
- Engineering teams often struggle to explain their work's business impact, unlike other departments.
- Observability helps translate engineering work into business language, enabling better resource allocation and strategic decision-making.
