Reliability

Observability is the ability to understand the internal state of a system by examining its external outputs. It is a broader capability than logging, and the gap between the two becomes obvious the first time a system reaches a state nobody designed for. This is the first post in a series on observability. It covers what the term means, why logs alone leave you debugging in production, the commercial case for investing in observability, and the bar an application has to clear before you can say it has it. ...

A company’s ability to operate in its market is bounded by what its backend can absorb: how fast safe changes reach production, whether a regression is contained or systemic, whether one broken component takes the rest down, whether a change has been exercised against production-like state before users see it, and whether the team observes problems before customers do. Each maps to a category of business risk and competitive position. ...