The Cloudcast #346 - What is Observability?


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May 08 2018 29 mins   1
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.

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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?





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