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A review by books_are_nice_and_enjoyable
Observability Engineering by Charity Majors
Hard to rate. If you're working at a publicly-facing-IT-service-as-a-core-business-company like Slack or Google there are probably a lot of useful ideas here (though hopefully Slack guys should be aware of some of them already..), and in some sense the book is also interesting simply on account of the fact that you get some insight into how companies like these approach problems like the ones covered in the book. In general, if you're not working extensively with distributed systems much of the book's content will simply not feel relevant to you.
The authors seem to have a very skewed perspective on many things and it makes the coverage feel less relevant to people not part of 'their' own environment; incident response times measured in seconds is all fine and nice and it may matter a lot to a company like Facebook. But in many successful companies, where IT services is not 'the core business', aiming for that kind of service level would just be idiotic because the value derived from that kind of responsiveness would be totally out of proportion with how much effort it would require and with what could otherwise be delivered using the same resources. It's so far from the reality of how things might be done that it risks making the coverage appear utterly irrelevant.
Some good ideas and interesting notions are included in the book, but it was hard for me to get all that excited about the coverage. The authors work for Honeycomb and although they did talk to some people who did not there were definitely many other people they did not talk to prior to writing the book, and you can definitely tell they didn't if you decide to read along.
The authors seem to have a very skewed perspective on many things and it makes the coverage feel less relevant to people not part of 'their' own environment; incident response times measured in seconds is all fine and nice and it may matter a lot to a company like Facebook. But in many successful companies, where IT services is not 'the core business', aiming for that kind of service level would just be idiotic because the value derived from that kind of responsiveness would be totally out of proportion with how much effort it would require and with what could otherwise be delivered using the same resources. It's so far from the reality of how things might be done that it risks making the coverage appear utterly irrelevant.
Some good ideas and interesting notions are included in the book, but it was hard for me to get all that excited about the coverage. The authors work for Honeycomb and although they did talk to some people who did not there were definitely many other people they did not talk to prior to writing the book, and you can definitely tell they didn't if you decide to read along.