2 years ago

Category: Data, apple

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, we discuss how observability should be easier to use and how it can be cost-effective. Our guests are Bartek Plotka, a principal engineer at Red Hat, as well as the SIG observability tech lead for the Thanos project and a Prometheus maintainer; and Richard Hartmann, community director at Grafana, a Prometheus maintainer, OpenMetrics founder and a SIG observability chair member for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

The focus of observability is more “about making humans understand or to enable humans to understand what is actually happening, what might be broken and what is running well, and to actually work with the data and extract new knowledge about the system from the data,” said Hartmann. Instead of the old-style monitoring system with one graph, some threshold and that’s it, as it matures, I think there is more and more of an understanding of what it actually is: about making humans understand what is happening,” said Hartmann.

Observability is “something more practical: the ability to essentially debug your application when it’s on fire when you really don’t know what’s happening, why it stopped, why it’s so slow and why it doesn’t handle the amount of requests you would expect it to handle.”