The Cloudcast #346 - What is Observability?

Brian talks with Christine Yen (@cyen, Co-Founder at @honeycombio) about the concept of Observability, why it's needed with new application and failure patterns, how to think about testing in production, and how to manage the collection of Observability data. Show Links: Honeycomb Homepage Honeycomb Blog [Velocity Conf] “End-to-End Observability for Fun and Profit” Use promo-code CLOUD for 20% off tickets to Velocity Conf [PODCAST] @PodCTL - Containers | Kubernetes | OpenShift - RSS Feed, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn and all your favorite podcast players [A CLOUD GURU] Get The Cloudcast Alexa Skill [A CLOUD GURU] A Cloud Guru Membership - Start your free trial. Unlimited access to the best cloud training and new series to keep you up-to-date on all things AWS. [A CLOUD GURU] FREE access to AWS Certification Exam Prep Guide - At A Cloud Guru, the #1 question received from students is "I want to pass the AWS cert exam, so where do I start?" This course is your answer. [FREE] eBook from O'Reilly Show Notes Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before we get into the topic of Observability, tell us about your background and how you ultimately came to founding Honeycomb? Topic 2 - Let’s start with the basics - what is “Observability” and is this new or different from the thing we’ve called “Monitoring” for a long time? What’s changing that is driving the need for Observability? Topic 3 - Digging into Observability, there seems to be this question of “how do we know if something is up?”. That seems both simple and complex (in context). Let’s talk about what that means in a distributed system. Topic 4 - So Honeycomb collects data about applications in a bunch of different ways - logs, agents, monitoring APIs, etc. - What does Honeycomb do to all that information to start making it useful? Topic 5 - I’ve heard your co-founder Charity Majors (@mipsytipsy) talk about this idea that Honeycomb allows people ask questions of the data. What does this mean? Topic 6 - I was reading your blog about Fender Guitars using Honeycomb for their applications. Fender isn’t a Silicon Valley company. How are non-Valley companies beginning to use these Observability models? Feedback? Email: show at thecloudcast dot net Twitter: @thecloudcastnet and @ServerlessCast FEEDBACK? Email: show @ the enterprise ai show dot com Bluesky: @TheEntAIShow.bsky.social Twitter/X: @TheEntAIShow Instagram: @TheEntAIShow