The Humans of DevOps Podcast Series S1 Ep21: Adopting Observability Principles
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Aug 13, 2020 
Charity Majors, Co-Founder and Engineer of honeycomb.io, dives into her journey of embracing observability principles. She discusses the shift from traditional monitoring to advanced observability tools, emphasizing the critical need for real-time insights. Charity highlights the cultural changes necessary for engineers to take ownership of their code and the importance of a supportive management structure. She also contrasts observability-driven development with Test-Driven Development, advocating for curiosity and continuous learning in modern IT practices.
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From Undebuggable To Instant Diagnosis
- Charity Majors recounts struggling to debug Parse and how internal Facebook tool Scuba revealed high-cardinality slices quickly.
- That ability reduced debugging time from days to seconds and changed how she perceived systems.
Observability Became A Sense
- Charity explains how observability became essential to her workflow after Facebook, feeling like a new sense.
- That realization led her to start Honeycomb to build tools that provide that visibility.
Observability As Control Theory Applied
- Observability, from control theory, measures how much you can infer about internal state from outside observations.
- Charity frames observability as the ability to answer any question about system state without shipping new code.