Thread by @mipsytipsy

hey man, you know me, I don't like talking smack about others, and I'm not sitting over here whittling and looking for excuses to litigate people's usage of the word observability.

but then there's this chronosphere.io/wp-content/upl…
and this chronosphere.io/learn/explain-…

and i go 🤯🥵😵‍💫🤯

they are literally describing monitoring. good ol', 30-year-old traditional monitoring.

* Notify
* Triage
* Understand

this is a company with a billion dollar valuation and they literally don't know the difference between monitoring and observability

i mean, we can all argue over the subtleties of observability and that's relatively understandable, but doesn't fucking EVERYBODY know what *monitoring* is and does?

cause it hasn't changed. in like.. ever

and no. the workflow with a good observability tool looks nothing like this, really. if you're practicing observability-driven-development, you're instrumenting as you go, and checking prod regularly via the lens of your instrumentation, in a tight, virtuous feedback loop.

the overwhelming majority of the bugs you write and ship to production will never actually trigger an alert or a notification. only the really super bad ones rise to that level, the ones that consume way more resources.

and those are actually pretty rare.

you need to be looking at your code in production every day even if it's *not* paging you constantly. exploring production is an important part of understanding if your code is doing what you expected it to.

it's not just about the bugs and the outages and the downtime,

it's also about asking questions like, is anybody using this feature? what was the actual impact of my change on this other system? where is most of the time being spent?

you don't wait for your system to go down before you bother to begin to understand how your system works.

you want to be in a constant conversation with your code in production. like any responsible builder.

i like to think of newly deployed code as 'the fourth trimester'. it isn't fully baked yet; it can't fend for itself. you need to raise it up, gain confidence in it over time.

apropos of nothing but my need for a palate cleanser, here is a brilliant piece about how sociotechnical software systems really work. by @paulosman

paulosman.me/2021/10/02/soc…