I feel like Haley Joel Osment at this point.

Except its not ghosts I see everywhere. It's coaching!

I was talking with my friend and colleague Karo* today, and we discussed observability for a little bit.

It's such an interesting topic! So I decided to look into it some more.

Or, as I like to call it, "channel my inner Abby Bangser"!* Which inevitably lead me to Charity Majors* of Honeycomb fame. I found a very cool thread she wrote a few years back. Here are the parts that leapt out at me:

"...the technical definition of observability is the ability to understand what's happening inside the system, just by looking at it from the outside.

You need to be able to understand any system state, even ones you've never seen and couldn't have predicted in advance."

"Your tool provides observability if you can answer these questions:

🐝 is something wrong?

🐝 what is wrong?

🐝 how is it wrong?

🐝 why is it wrong? what happened to cause the error?

🐝 who all is impacted by the error?

🐝 what {1..n} things do those affected have in common?"

"🐝 where in the system is the error or latency coming from?

🐝 is this a transient error or linked to specific characteristics, ie size of payload, source up

🐝 **And so many more.

I don't mean to imply that o11y is all about errors; it manifestly is not."

If that doesn't sound like coaching, I don't know what does!

* Who is awesome, and you should follow immediately!

**If You're wondering what the bee emojis are for, they're from the original Twitter thread. Honeycomb... Bees... Geddit?