Observability 2.0

There is very charismatic talk from Charity Majors, Co-Author of "Observability Engineering", called Is it time for Observability 2.0? Sounds intriguing, so let's check what's inside.

Key ideas:
📍 Observability 1.0. It's traditional observability techniques based on 3 pillars: logs, metrics and traces. It's complex, expensive and requires skilled engineer to analyze correlations between different sources of data.
📍 Observability 1.0 has significant limitations:
- static dashboards
- lack of important details
- designed to answer to pre-defined questions
- multiple source of truth
- multiple systems to support
📍Observability 2.0 paradigm is based on the idea to use wide structured logs that contain all necessary information. It makes easy to aggregate data, zoom in and out for details when needed.
📍Observability 2.0 based on single source of truth - logs, all others is just visualization, aggregation and making dynamic queries. There is no data duplication. There is no need to install and maintain a set of tools for the telemetry. In that terms it's cheaper.

Implementation tips:
📍 Instrument the code using principles of Canonical Logs (we already checked the concept there)
📍Add Trace IDs and Span IDs to trace requests chain execution
📍 Feed the data into a columnar store, to move away from predefined schemas or indexes
📍 Use a storage engine that supports high cardinality
📍Adopt tools with explorable interfaces or dynamic dashboards

Our systems have become too hard and complicated. So it's critical to have effective observability tools and practices. The approach from the talk looks promising especially as it doesn't require any new tools to be developed. Let's see if it become a new trend in observability implementation.

#engineering #observability