Observability Engineering: Achieving Production Excellence

Observability Engineering digs into what Observability actually _means_ (very very roughly "if you can answer novel questions to previously unknown problems without adding new telemetry of some kind, you have an observable system). It talks about the fundamental concepts, how it all works, how these systems are not technical, they are sociotechnical systems. And it talks about how observability leads naturally to a common language between devs and biz folks.That "sociotechnical" bit gets glossed over by lots of folks. If you're in a large company, and you're trying to convince management that they need to pony up some hard cash to build or buy observability? That's a social problem, not a technical one. Observability Engineering explicitly talks about this kind of stuff. It talks about the value add of observability in ways that will appeal to engineers, to product owners, as well as to budget holders.The book touches briefly on how you might go about building your own stack, albeit at a very high level.Lots of folks have complained about "it reads like an advert for Honeycomb" and... maybe they missed the parts where the authors very loudly proclaim where they work, and how that affects the book, and the parts where they talk Jaeger and Prometheus and Icinga and and and. Oh, and how they stress the _vendor neutral_ OTel standards they're pushing for.One of the little gems I discovered in the book is in the chapter "Forecasting to Create a Predictive Burn Alert". There's a bunch of stuff on forecasts of your error budget over differing time periods, and I realised that the same technique applies to ANY time series... and I happen to be working on some stuff that uses lots of time series.I heartily recommend this book to anyone interested in building systems that work for their customers.

I wish I could give this book more than 5 stars, it was that good. I've been in the software industry for quite some time now, and I've been troubleshooting systems during this time. This book has absolutely changed the way that I will go about this in the future. This redefines how we should be developing our software and how we should be observing it. So many times reading this book it dawned on me how simply brilliant the concepts are. There's no going back.If you think "observability" is just a new buzzword for "monitoring", then you really owe it to yourself to pickup a copy of this book. You will end this knowing the truth about what observability is, and I'll admit it is a difficult concept to understand from a brief look. A lot of confusion that has stemmed from observability is due to the change in core thinking about how we should be looking at complex systems. This book gives you the tools to dig to that root and change that perception.Another thing that I really love about this book is that it talks about the "why" in-depth, but then continues to dive deep into the implementation. It touches upon OpenTelemetry, a new(er) way to make our software more observable.This book is heavy with content and information. One of the few books that I will definitely be re-reading in the near future!

Observability Engineering is a practical approach to the age old problem of getting useful information out of systems under the not so age old conditions of large-scale-distributed systems.This book builds a nice first principles styled overview of the problem, and walks through concepts like logs, metrics, spans, traces, alerting, telemetry etc etc. it is idea heavy, not a code tutorial or implementation guide.You’ll see very few code blocks compared to the typical O’Reilly programming-oriented books you may be familiar with.As someone who’s implemented these systems with varying degrees of success, most value was had at the later chapters and further reflection and rumination on them.Ex: Implementation ROI, service level objective driven thinking, observability in conjunction with BI tools and other managerial level/bean counter things.I think Observability will eventually become a org-culture thing rather than a set of tools or a role you hire, similar to the DevOps movement.⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This book is a solid overview of software observability. It covers the history of software ops, the trend towards metrics and dashboards, and finally the proactive storage of high cardinality traces and spans. It contains enough technical detail to allow one to jury rig observability solution in a pinch, and better yet aids in the adoption of a vendor via Open Telemetry. Highly Recommend.

Amazing book. I wish the naysayers, actually took the time to read and understand this book. It would save me so much time in Postmortems and Design Reviews when I repeatedly tell them how much is missing for their services to be considered healthy.

Some of the content in this book is useful but it reads mostly as marketing material for honeycomb

Although the content of the book is highly interesting and carries significant influence on software engineering (SWE), there are a few flaws in some of the chapters. Specifically, the author could have been more objective and direct when explaining the concepts, as they tend to ramble on, making the reading experience boring and exhaustive.

It's an easy read and has lots of great tidbits of information. The book doesn't really contain more info than what's already out there in the blogosphere but it does present what I consider good selling points to convince others of the value of observability.As other reviews have pointed out, it can be pretty repetitive on some topics, but I still enjoyed reading it.Also it could really use some more diagrams to break up the text.

The authors of Observability Engineering created a book that educates with principles and provides practical experience about observability. The structure of the book introduces the principles, concepts and practical experience relevant to the learner . This book is not only for engineers but also for everyone in the field of software with a distributed characteristic. Read it and you will discover the journey, balance and attractive forces on how a healthy organization can be created with developer happiness and customer happiness :)

This book is a must-read for anyone looking to move away from merely correlating squiggly lines on a dashboard to find out if something is broken.It introduces a lot of ideas that companies which are now at a considerably scale are looking to do themselves. Structured events, sampling methods, issues with cardinality, SLO based alerting, are all fundamental things which need to be well explained in order for an organisation to do observability well; All of which are covered well in the book.

Well written. Helped accelerate my career. Recommending it to my colleagues.