Observability for developers: How to get from here to there

Observability may be the hot new thing, but for many devs, it's unclear how to gracefully get from where they are now (searching across logs or using canned APM tools) to debugging production with ease. Christine Yen makes the case that observability can be more valuable to devs than ops, and she lays out a series of practical steps to up-level a team's ability to ask questions of production.

There’s been a lot of talk about software ownership—but what does “owning code in production” really mean for developers day to day? Many development teams still reach for logs in production as the most familiar way to bridge the development environment with production. Christine Yen makes the case that observability—and the skills to craft the right graphs and read them—benefits developers more than it does operators by examining several instances where well-informed devs can supercharge their development process, such as data-driven product decisions (or how to know more about what needs to be done than your PM), rewrites and migrations, feature flags and testing in production, and fine-grained performance analysis. Then, she lays out a series of steps to get your team from grepping unstructured text logs to outputting and analyzing well-structured traces. Instrumentation and observability aren’t all-or-nothing endeavors, and you’ll leave with an idea of the next step you can take to improve your ability to understand your production systems.