6. Observability is a socio-technical system.
It goes beyond systems and software, and runs through the whole organization—different lines of business, teams, roles, and people.
It lets you see how all of your applications—as well as their underlying services and systems—relate, so you can understand dependencies across organizational boundaries, and troubleshoot and solve problems faster.
It’s visibility into people and processes, not just technology.
“Observability encompasses the whole socio-technical system—the human side, the sensors—there’s no line of demarcation between the technical side and the people running it. If you try to separate them into neat little buckets—well, it’s impossible, and the effort to do it undermines your effort to understand what’s going on and identify where to improve.”
Beth Long, Sr. Software Engineer, New Relic
7. Observability lets you move faster.
It gives you context into relationships and lets you respond much more quickly to incidents.
“Managing our growing microservices environment requires observability ... a single pane of glass where we can understand what’s going on in the underlying infrastructure, our individual applications, and all our microservices. Not only can we make sure we’re meeting our service level objectives, but when things go wrong, we can resolve the issue faster. ... It lets us move fast without the wheels coming off.”
Matthew Tapper, Lead Site Reliability Engineer, Culture Amp
8. Observability is an infinite loop.
It’s a journey, not a destination; constant improvement, not wholesale change. If you believe you’ve reached “perfect” observability, you are wrong. If you don’t continue adapting and improving your observability practice to keep up with changes in business requirements and best practices, it will eventually be insufficient.
The good news is a successful observability practice will improve the inner workings of your entire business. The bad news is you’re never done working to maintain it.
“How we deal with today’s problems is going to open up a whole new set of problems, and keeping on top of that is the big challenge in the next few years.”
Beth Long, Sr. Software Engineer, New Relic
9. Observability is leaving work at work and sleeping better at night.
It’s beating alert fatigue and physical fatigue—with the peace of mind that your system is resilient enough to weather issues without complete failure, and with alerts prioritized so you’ll be interrupted only for something critical.
“Not having visibility over a system you’re responsible for—you will lose sleep at night. And you will feel powerless because you don’t have the information you need.”
Beth Long, Sr. Software Engineer, New Relic
10. Observability is a superpower.
It lets you rethink how you’re doing a job and understand how software changes—connections between your tools, applications, and infrastructure—affect the end user. It empowers you to improve that experience without jeopardizing system health.
“Observability allows me to be a data storyteller by having access to all of the data. It allows me to be a better leader, galvanize necessary support within the organization, and achieve goals.”
Josh Biggley, TechOps Strategy Consultant, New Relic