Observability

Introduction

I have been reading excellent Database Reliability Engineering book and below are my notes from it.

• Key Incentive(s) for Automation

  • Elimination of Toil - Toil is the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and that scales linearly as a service grows.

• Important System Characteristics

  • Latency, also known as response time, is a time-based measurement indicating how long it takes to receive a response from a request. It is best to measure this for end-to-end response from the customer rather than breaking it down component by component. This is customer-centric design and is crucial for any system that has customers, which is any system

Background

How many times have we landed up in a meeting staring at random slowness or such production issues in a distributed Application ? only to experience helplessness with limited (or often times no) visibility available about the runtime behavior of the Application. It often ends up in manually correlating whatever diagnostic data available from Application and combining it with trace/logs that are available from O/S, databases etc. and trying to figure out “Root cause” of the issue.