✨THERE ARE NO✨
✨THREE PILLARS OF✨
✨OBSERVABILITY.✨
and the fact that everybody keeps blindly repeating this mantra (and cargo culting these primitives) is probably why our observability tooling is 10 years behind the rest of our software tool chain.
✨THREE PILLARS OF✨
✨OBSERVABILITY.✨
and the fact that everybody keeps blindly repeating this mantra (and cargo culting these primitives) is probably why our observability tooling is 10 years behind the rest of our software tool chain.
I'm not joking. I think it's incredibly harmful. And inaccurate. It's as though someone declared there are "Three Pillars of Software Engineering: Compiled Languages, Functional Languages and Linked Lists."
you'd be like... "whaaa?"
you'd be like... "whaaa?"
"Three Pillars" implies some sort of definition. But "metrics, logs and traces" are a random grab bag! Two primitive data storage types (one of which should never be used anymore) and one visualization layer (for third type which isn't named!).
This drives me BATSHIT.
This drives me BATSHIT.
You want to know why observability is playing catch up? Because the EVENT is the execution path of your code through the system. It is the correct lens through which to understand your systems from the inside out. Without it, you are toast.
The event is the connective tissue for metrics, logs and tracing, because you can derive the first two from events and you can visualize the third from events.
But it doesn't go in reverse: you can never work backwards from metrics, logs, and/or traces to get your event back.
But it doesn't go in reverse: you can never work backwards from metrics, logs, and/or traces to get your event back.
You want to know why you have fifty fucking tools to flip back and forth between any time you try to debug anything?
Blame the three pillars.
Blame the three pillars.
You want to know why you need all these different products to do slightly different things with exactly the same God damn data?
Blame the three pillars, and twenty years of cargo culting these storage primitives.
Blame the three pillars, and twenty years of cargo culting these storage primitives.
Context is EVERYTHING in debugging, yet people have been happily discarding it all irretrievably at write time because they were so stuck in the mindset of metrics, logs and traces.
This shit matters, man. How we frame it in our brain informs what we build going forward.
This shit matters, man. How we frame it in our brain informs what we build going forward.
I'm very carefully not going to talk smack about others in the space, but you can see everyone reaching for a unified system of observability.
Sadly, they keep doing it by acquiring companies or building products to fill in the metrics, logs and tracing trio.
Sadly, they keep doing it by acquiring companies or building products to fill in the metrics, logs and tracing trio.
Watch this talk by @grepory, where he lays out the problem perfectly and eloquently. speakerdeck.com/grepory/monito…
(he then went to work at a monitoring company, and *blocked me* for quoting from this talk. I shit you not. Still a great talk!)
(he then went to work at a monitoring company, and *blocked me* for quoting from this talk. I shit you not. Still a great talk!)
... omg I just remembered that @rakyll *also* blocked me for pointing out the problems with "three pillars".
why is this such a sensitive topic?? no one has ever blocked me for my technical opinions on, say, storage engines. 🤔
why is this such a sensitive topic?? no one has ever blocked me for my technical opinions on, say, storage engines. 🤔
