The latest News and Information on Observabilty for complex systems and related technologies.
If there was a question on if an enterprise needed an observability pipeline in 2019 or 2020, we now know the answer is: yes. The observability data management methods of the 2010s aren’t going to work in the 2020s. Data is growing too fast for us to ignore, and the need to gain intelligence from said data continues to grow in importance. Data (and access to it) is becoming a competitive edge for many enterprises today.
What's the first small thing to do in o11y that would teach me something, bring something valuable, and open the way for something else? Observability doesn’t have to be a big, company-wide project. It can be useful locally and individually. A little playing around can get you some crucial insight into how your software works. Try it as a team, or in a pair, or by yourself. It takes 3 steps: Step 1 is easy. The other two might take ten minutes, or maybe more like a day.
Creating an observability strategy is a lot like playing with Legos: It takes small building blocks to create a bigger picture, but the slightest mistake could throw off an entire build — and often you realize it very late in the process and have to rip and repair the Hogwarts castle infrastructure you spent many days creating.
In March, we announced official support for a Honeycomb Terraform Provider. Today, we’re announcing additional support for managing Honeycomb Service Level Objectives (SLOs) with Terraform. This furthers Honeycomb’s support for configuration as code and it gives you programmatic control for an immensely popular Honeycomb feature.
It has been seven years since Rent the Runway posted their engineering ladder, kicking off a veritable trend of engineering teams open sourcing their ladders. Interestingly, nearly all of them seem to have coalesced around “area of scope” as a useful proxy for level. At first glance, “area of scope” does seem to make sense. Senior engineers should be able to work across larger areas of the organization. In addition, your area of influence should expand as you gain experience.
Whether you’ve just started your observability journey or haven’t started one at all, Techstrong Research is here to help the industry gain insights into observability with their “Observability at the Speed of Innovation 2022” survey, sponsored by StackState. Techstrong Research, an industry analyst and consulting group focused on the business outcomes of disruptive technologies, is researching where organizations are in their observability journey.
Having joined Grafana Labs as one of our first data & analytics hires, I spent much of my time in the first few months considering how we should structure our data stack to optimize for a quick path to value, while allowing our small data team to scale going forward.
