Observability Engineering
“Observability Engineering” by Charity Majors, Liz Fong-Jones, and George Miranda is an excellent book introducing the fundamentals of observability as well as practical advice for implementing observability in various engineering teams.
Summary of the book
The book is split into five different parts:
- The Path to Observability
- Fundamentals of Observability
- Observability for Teams
- Observability at Scale
- Spreading Observability Culture
The book starts out by defining what observability is from a mathematical perspective to applying it to software systems. It then carefully differentiates observability from monitoring and debugging, pointing out how traditional monitoring is fundamentally reactive. Part I ends with a summary of how observability relates to DevOps, SRE, and cloud native technologies.
Part II focuses on the building blocks of observability, explaining how traditional logs are no longer enough and why tracing is necessary. It introduces OpenTelemetry as a recommended path to implement tracing and show examples of debugging.
In Part III, the authors give more practical advice on applying observability practices for different teams. Observability Driven Development (ODD) principles are introduced, focusing specifically on Service-Level Objectives (SLO) to achieve better reliability.
The last two parts focus on observability at scale, ranging from efficient data storage and sampling techniques, to spreading observability culture by aligning stakeholders and making a business case for observability.
Intended audience
This book is an excellent overview of observability engineering from the thought leaders at Honeycomb. Any engineer or manager wanting to invest more in observability on their teams or simply wanting to learn about best practices would get a lot from reading this book. The book strikes a great balance of theoretical and practical advice from real-world examples.