Observability

more data, more questions

Wednesday, June 19, 2019

As architect of the KPN API Store I gave a presentation on observability and our quest to get more insight into our platform.

A very brief overview of the slides:

Monitoring

Monitoring is for symptom-based alerting

Your monitoring system should address two questions: what’s broken, and why?

  • The “what’s broken” indicates the symptom
  • The “why” indicates a (possibly intermediate) cause.

Observability

“Observability”, is a superset of “monitoring”, providing certain benefits and insights that “monitoring” tools cannot deliver.

Observability is about unknown-unknowns. Empowering you to ask new questions and answer questions yet to be formulated …

Lessonslearned

  • Get a platform dashboard on-screen
  • Beware of the anti-pattern of monitoring everything
  • Understand the social and financial implications
  • From unknown-unknowns to known-unknowns and more questions

Known Unknowns

Sources

References