Observability is an attribute of a system. A system either has it, or does not have it. Most systems don’t have it. Even if they have some amount of reporting and system metrics — it doesn’t mean your system is observable.
A system is observable when you can ask questions, new questions, about how its performing (both technically, and the business goals) without having to make any changes or deploys. As an engineer who has built a lot of systems, I do not actually think I’ve built one that is observable. It is a high bar — but worth achieving.
This is a very technical issue, but it is actually a solution to a business problem. I am very encouraged to see clear communication from engineers about it. You can follow the #o11y hashtag on twitter. The hashtag and conversation came out of the DevOps community, which has been focused on merging infrastructure with their larger product organizations, rather than a line-item on a budget somewhere.
To make a long story short to create an observable system you have to merge the monitoring of system health and business metrics. Many times, business metrics can be very vague and fuzzy. But if you’re an e-commerce site you want to know how much a 5% slowdown in response time affects order conversion — in order to know how much to spend on infrastructure & engineering to avoid the 5% slowdown! Otherwise you’re just guessing. Hitting a quarterly goal is actually very vague and has a large number of dependencies.
It wouldn’t be hard to write a single report that correlates % slowdown with order conversions. But then, if you wanted to know “What is our % of repeat customers when we shipped them something late?” do you have to write another report? If you do, your system isn’t yet observable. There is nothing wrong with that. And you have to decide how far you want to go here.
The larger and more complex your system is — the larger the engineering challenge to get all that data. But if you’re losing this information (because you’re not capturing it) you don’t know what you don’t know. That is scary. That is how someone comes along and eats your lunch.
Read more: Observability: a goal