ferd/cloud-native-observability

An open access guide to Cloud-Native Observability.

About This Project

What is the goal of this project? To provide a clear, concise, and unbiased overview of cloud-native observability.

Why is that important? Despite untold millions of marketing dollars spent in and around observability (or maybe because of the untold millions of marketing dollars spent), cloud-native observability practice today is often shallow, siloed, or both. It doesn't need to be that way.

Who is this for? Observability practitioners, SRE's and DevOps engineers, end-users of observability systems, and anyone involved in building and running cloud-native software at scale.

How can you help? You can contribute in several ways --

• Adding your stories and learnings to an appendix.
• Helping refine and shape this repository through contributions
• Tackling a good first issue
• Giving us a star and sharing the repository!

This project is in a draft state. We are actively refining, polishing, and iterating on the content. Our goal is to spend March 2022 doing refinement, then make it generally available in April 2022.

What We're Looking For

Currently, we would appreciate feedback (either via issues or pull requests) in the following areas:

• Overall structure and flow of the document.
• Overall comprehension of the text/themes.
• Un-defined, under-defined, or over-defined themes/concepts/terms.
• General feedback on the ideas.
• Illustrations and explanatory diagrams.

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Table of Contents

• README
• Foreward
• Glossary
• Introduction
  • What's the point of software development, anyway?
  • Why Cloud-Native Matters
• Customers and Engineers, Transactions and Resources
  • Transactions
  • Resources
  • SLI's and SLO's
• The Anatomy of Observability
  • Telemetry
  • Persistence
  • Workflows
• Telemetry Creation and OpenTelemetry
  • Instrumentation and Granularity
  • OpenTelemetry and Commodity Telemetry
• Effective Monitoring
  • Effective Dashboards
  • Effective Alerting
  • Fantastic SLO's and Where To Find Them
• Effective Investigation
  • Context -- What Ties Everything Together
  • Guided Analysis vs. Data Exploration
  • Tagging and Cardinality
• Effective SLO's
  • Counting the Uncountable
  • Pushing the Envelope
• Telemetry ROI -- The Elephant in the Room
  • Costs Go Up, ROI Goes Down -- You Can Explain That
  • The Predictive Value of Telemetry
  • Cost Reduction Strategies
• Organizational Concerns
  • Combating the 'Three Pillars' ideology
  • Build, Buy, and Everything Inbetween
  • Organizing Effective Observability Through Centralization

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Contributing

We gladly accept pull requests! Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for more.

Special Thanks

This guide is made possible thanks to Lightstep.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.