Observability - A fad or reality?

Hello 👋🏽

Welcome to Dev Shorts. Issue #20 talks about Observability, & an OSS Cloud review checklist project!

Before I start talking about this week’s topic. I’m sorry I’m unable to send the newsletter for the last two weeks, for a wide variety of reasons that includes some necessary travel I had to take up :)

I’d try not to miss sending the newsletter in the upcoming times.

. . .

Over the last few weeks, I spoke at our live tech show Elastic Byte - Season 3 about Observability, a topic that is so popular in DevOps circles.

If you are new to this term about Observability (o11y), I’d recommend you look at one of my talks where I specifically explain it!

I think there are many definitions now for Observability, but, for me, it always points back to this blog post written by Cindy Sridharan.

I have always felt Observability like a developer productivity initiative than a new thing in the DevOps world 😅

Observability can help you gather evidence to investigate an intermittent issue that is not getting reproduced in your developer environment or help you correlate infrastructure metrics and code performance.

Observability is not just collecting data or monitoring alerts, even though they are quintessential in today’s cloud world.

Today, O11y is reality. Many engineering organizations have realized the importance of this. Some show these metrics in real-time as analytics on their platform, like loading a page in X milliseconds, etc.

The only problem I observe in this space is the growing tool fad. I believe there is always more than one way to solve a problem. There are many frameworks for Distributed Tracing, Logs Collection, Metrics Servers, but the concept remains the same.

Like Cindy said in the blog post, “No amount of "observability” or “monitoring” tooling can ever be a substitute to good engineering intuition and instincts.“

Watch our Observability series, where we focus on a wide variety of topics like JSON Logging, Open Telemetry, observing Kubernetes, and more.

A lot has happened in the last few weeks and I’ve read multiple interesting dev bits.. here are the top two from them.

If you are a k8s fan and always looking out for things happening in the community. Learnk8s has made this image which would help you keep updated with news & events from k8s.

And if you are looking to exit vim, here are some tips 😃 

Lastly, if you are following the latest news from FB and all the noise about metaverse! Trends change quickly…

If you like this week’s newsletter, rate it with “thumbs up/down.”

Sincerely,

Aravind Putrevu 👋🏽