Observability Is Cultural

I’m guilty of applying the word "debugging" to practically anything. My kids' Legos won’t fit, let’s debug that. Observability is one of the few disciplines that actually warrant that moniker: it is debugging. But traditional debugging doesn’t really fit with observability practices. I usually call it “precognitive debugging." We need to have a rough idea in advance of what our debugging process will look like for effective observability troubleshooting.

Note that this doesn’t apply to developer observability, which is a special case. That’s a more dynamic process that more closely resembles a typical debugging session. This is about more traditional monitoring and observability: where we need to first instrument the system and add logs, metrics, etc. to cover the information we would need as we will later investigate the issue.

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