Redefining Observability
hazelweakly.me
Redefining Observability
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: Redefining Observability
#2Needs improvement. Something called *ability should be defined as a property, not a process. Good definitions do not randomly assign meaning to words without looking at its structure.
Re: Redefining Observability
#3The section under “Hazels definition” leaves a narcissistic aftertaste. The domain name weirdly adds to it.
Re: Redefining Observability
#4Needs improvement. Something called *ability should be defined as a property, not a process. Good definitions do not randomly assign meaning to words without looking at its structure.
I hate all of these goofy neologisms corporate culture comes up with ("impactful") that are just abuses of syntax and have no reason to exist
because there's already a word that means the same thing. In this case the word visibility already means exactly what's being described here (impactful -> impressive/effective/significant).
Re: Redefining Observability
#5The section under “Hazels definition” leaves a narcissistic aftertaste. The domain name weirdly adds to it.
Idk whats bad about explicitly stating your own opinion on your own website that nobody forced you to enter. Because of people like, that hate without a particular reason, the web becomes a useless place where having your own opinion is something to be ashamed of.
I guess its better to scroll tiktok feeds and stay shut.
Re: Redefining Observability
#6a lot of what hazel mentioned is something that charity majors defined too, but one new perspective definitely is incorporating capability into the definition of observability rather than a process/strategy/tool that makes the system observable
although some parts of it seemed to be not well formed yet, like "disagree and commit" section
Re: Redefining Observability
#7"""
The fact that observability is often sold as a tool to infrastructure teams is throwing out the entire point of the idea by burying it in the implementation. Nobody buys PowerBI because they need to invest in “super fancy ass spreadsheet generation capabilities” or some shit like that, and likewise you shouldn’t be buying an observability vendor because you need a way to store system diagnostic information, it literally doesn’t make sense–observability is not a data problem.
"""
I really liked this justification for involving people into the definition, but one could also argue that people are what powers "observability" rather than "observability" consisting of people's ability to use it for its intended goal
almost all definitions of processes/platforms/tools could be redefined to involve the peoples ability to use it for its intended goal i.e chaos testing is not a platform but the ability of people to pose meaningful hypothesis of real life chaos and test that chaos on the system. probably they should?
Re: Redefining Observability
#8Needs improvement. Something called *ability should be defined as a property, not a process. Good definitions do not randomly assign meaning to words without looking at its structure.
I hate all of these goofy neologisms corporate culture comes up with ("impactful") that are just abuses of syntax and have no reason to exist because there's already a word that means the same thing. In this case the word visibility already means exactly what's being described here (impactful -> impressive/effective/significant).
This sort of thing also happened a lot in philosophy and in (the more theoretical parts of) the art world. Back in the 1990s it was somewhat excusable for non-native speakers to come up with new ilities and ities, also because they had nowhere to ask for a proper word to use. ChatGPT seems to more or less solve this.
However, what is even worse IMHO, is when people do not invent new words, and overload an existing concept with a totally different meaning.
Re: Redefining Observability
#9Needs improvement. Something called *ability should be defined as a property, not a process. Good definitions do not randomly assign meaning to words without looking at its structure.
I hate all of these goofy neologisms corporate culture comes up with ("impactful") that are just abuses of syntax and have no reason to exist because there's already a word that means the same thing. In this case the word visibility already means exactly what's being described here (impactful -> impressive/effective/significant).
I have to disagree with this.
Yes existing terms have meaning, but they also have baggage.
Forming a new term is a reasonably effective way to shed that baggage and attempt to start the cycle all over again.
Seeing a term you’re not as familiar with and needing to look up the definition (whether that’s a local or a global definition) is usually a good thing IME.
Re: Redefining Observability
#10I think your definition of observability sits on top of the other two (Control & Cognitive definitions) and ultimately is more of a description of an approach to observability rather than a redefinition of it.
Observability is hard and I agree with the approach you've laid out, especially on the involvement of leadership insight. It's crucial and it has been omitted or ignored while working on this for a decade. The tooling improves but the same organisational problems persist. And there's an over reliance on hyper-competent people to get this working well than on an agreed set of practices that help offset the average competency that exists in most places. Don't get me wrong we need competent people but I find that when they leave so do the good practices.
Redefining it is not going to do much since these are organisational, cultural problems which all happen to be the issues that hobbled DevOps and the SRE movements and we all know how those movements turned out - they never matured into any of the promises they made.