Tech Lead Journal

“Observability is a technique for ensuring that you can understand novel problems in your system. Can you understand what’s happening in your system and why, without having to push a new code by slicing and dicing existing telemetry signals that are coming out of your system?"

Liz Fong-Jones is the co-author of the “Observability Engineering” book and a Principal Developer Advocate for SRE and Observability at Honeycomb. In this episode, Liz shared in-depth about observability and why it is becoming an important practice in the industry nowadays. Liz started by explaining the fundamentals of observability and how it differs from traditional monitoring. She explained some important concepts, such as the core analysis loop, cardinality and dimensionality, and doing debugging from a first principle. Later, Liz shared the current state of observability and how we can improve our observability by doing observability driven development and improving our practices based on the proposed observability maturity model found in the book.

Listen out for:

• Career Journey - [00:05:44]
• Observability - [00:06:30]
• Pillars of Observability - [00:09:57]
• Monitoring and SLO - [00:12:28]
• Core Analysis Loop - [00:15:06]
• Cardinality and Dimensionality - [00:18:41]
• Debugging from First Principle - [00:21:20]
• Current State of Observability - [00:26:49]
• Implementing Observability - [00:30:20]
• Observability Driven Development - [00:36:53]
• Having Developers On-Call - [00:39:06]
• Observability Maturity Model - [00:41:59]
• 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:44:10]

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Liz Fong-Jones’s Bio
Liz is a developer advocate, labor and ethics organizer, and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with 17+ years of experience. She is an advocate at Honeycomb for the SRE and Observability communities, and previously was an SRE working on products ranging from the Google Cloud Load Balancer to Google Flights. She lives in Vancouver, BC with her wife Elly, partners, and a Samoyed/Golden Retriever mix, and in Sydney, NSW. She plays classical piano, leads an EVE Online alliance, and advocates for transgender rights.

Follow Liz:

• Twitter – @lizthegrey
• LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/efong/
• Website – https://www.lizthegrey.com/
• GitHub – https://github.com/lizthegrey

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For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/88.