Observability for Testers

I have been interested in this topic ever since I have started following Abby Bangser, Charity Majors and Liz Fong-Jones tweets about SRE and Observability. 

"Observability" was a term I first encountered while I was going through Agile Testing Days Tweets. 

Observability workshop with @benny_hfm day 1 is in the books. What a fantastic group today at #AgileTD!

After a day benefiting from observability in our app, tomorrow we will be exploring what it feels like in a less observable version. 🦄😍

SSH and string logs anyone? 😈

— Abby Bangser (@a_bangser) November 3, 2019

It was a beginning for me with this new term and all new questions -

• What do we Observe?
• How do we observe?
• How do you know what to observe?
• Is observability applicable for every type of system? 
• I'm a tester, so would this be useful for me or is it just for SRE's and ops teams?

I got even more interested when I got a chance to pair with Abby on Observability and building the infrastructure stack for DIMA app on my Testing Tour.  

 Every system has issues on production, we can never say that the system is completely immune and there are no bugs at all. Having too many production issues is not the actual problem but how easy is it to fix those issues is the actual problem. What's the first thing we need to know to fix those issues?

We need to find out the root cause and debug so we can have enough information to fix the issue. 

The more observable the system is, it becomes easier to find the root cause of the issue and then that information could be used to find out how complex it is to fix it. 

Observability helps in getting the visibility of the system and making the system observable. It's not just making the system observable for fixing the issues but also helps us ask the questions about our system and lets us find the answers. I'm still learning and new to this topic but I'm going to share my learnings as I go forward. 

It lets you find the answers to the questions you might have about your system. 

Observability, short and sweet:

- can you understand whatever internal state the system has gotten itself into?

...just by inspecting and interrogating its output?

...even if (especially if) you have never seen it happen before? https://t.co/0HslcUKoOQ

— Charity Majors (@mipsytipsy) November 26, 2019

 

Monitoring is your bank telling you you're overdrawn.

Observability is the ability to tell you're running out of money because you're spending too much money on chocolates, cakes and sweets because you've recorded data on what you spent your money on throughout the month. https://t.co/kQcvlUWqqV

— Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) (@lizthegrey) February 21, 2020

Here are few of the resources I have been going through while trying to learn and understand about 'Observability' 

• https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/observability-a-manifesto/
• https://semaphoreci.com/blog/honeycomb-ceo-on-sharing-customer-pain
• https://semaphoreci.com/blog/observability-measuring-microservices
• https://thenewstack.io/what-is-observability/
• https://lightstep.com/observability/
• https://sdarchitect.blog/2020/01/08/understanding-observability/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=MNDmKyEPs1c
• https://www.infoq.com/presentations/observability-testing/
• https://www.infoq.com/presentations/observable-distributed-ststems/
• https://www.thoughtworks.com/en-gb/insights/blog/observability/why-observability-matters-testers

I got an opportunity to be part of  "Observability for Tester" organised by Annie-Marie Charrett along with Lisa Crispin, Abby Bangser, Trisha Chetani and Niranjani. It's a 4 weeks program with each session for 90 minutes. I will share a blog post for each session as part of learning and sharing.

• Observability for Testers: #Session 1
• Observability for Testers: #Session 2