Why observability is important in today's development process, including ideas on how to incorporate it into your workflow.

1. ObservabilityA mindset worth pursuing

2. ● Gain more confidence on your work
● Reduce your day-to-day stress
● Answer important questions easily
● Build better designed systems
● Free more time for new ideas
Investing in observability will Help you to...

3. ● What is observability?
● Why is that important?
● Observability pillars
○ Infrastructure
○ Tools
○ Culture
● Questions?
● Summary
Agenda

4. What is Observability?

5. What is Observability?

6. In control theory, it’s a measure for how well internal
states of a system can be inferred by knowledge of
its external outputs
What is Observability?

7. Observable systems allow humans to:
● Answer the question “Is it working properly?”
● Diagnose the scope of impact
● Identify what is going wrong
What is Observability?

8. Observable systems not only have the data
available to understand them, but the data is
accessible, explorable, and understandable in a
fast, user-friendly manner.
What is Observability?

9. Isn’t that monitoring?!
What is Observability?
Monitors
Alerts
Visualizations
Logs
Usage
Tracing
Culture

10. Why Observability is important?

11. Ownership
If you own it, you should be able to answer questions
if you own it, you should care

12. Impact
It's nice to think that what we do has an impact.
It’s awesome to prove it.

13. Lean Startup

14. Observability Driven Development
Using real production data to decide what to build, and
then validating and verifying that you shipped what you’ve
meant to ship, and it had the impact you desired, using
real production data in real time
(Charity Majors)

15. Observability in the wild
Companies that talk about observability

16. Observability Pillars
Infra
CultureTools

17. Infrastructure
Is something missing in our infrastructure?
It's up to us to make it happen!
If you found yourself implementing something new:
● Spread to word
● Can you invest time to enable it for other teams?
● Could it be in some way open sourced?
Infra
CultureTools

18. Tools of the trade (At Yotpo) Infra
CultureTools

19. Tools of the trade
Are you covering all the important endpoints?
Do you mark deployments in your graphs?
Your logs tells a story? Are they beneficial?
The important context is clear?
Do you know your endpoint e2e performance?
Are you leveraging synthetics?

20. Tools of the trade
Are you monitoring front end errors?
Do you have enough data in your errors to investigate?
Do you have an ops channel? Too much clutter?
What about smart links to quickly investigate issues?
Do you spread breadcrumbs that would help others?
Ever watched an error scenario in full story?
Used advanced filters like friction or css selector?

21. Tools of the trade
Know by heart your most important KPIs?
Do you have TV next to your station?
Every tool is a micro-cosmos: improve steady & slowly

22. Culture Infra
CultureTools
“It’s not about a specific technology, It’s about people”
(Cory Watson)

23. Playbook
Scenario #1
...In your next meeting, the PM presents a new
requirement
Ask First:
● Which metrics this requirement is trying to improve?
● If none-existent, can we add these metrics now to
validate the KPI?
● If it's a requirement that arises from customer
feedback - try to find the KPI anyway

24. Playbook
Scenario #2
...In a design meeting, developer shows new system design
Ask:
● Which metrics will allow us to know the system is
doing well?
● Do we know the metrics for each part, scalewize?
If not, can we add them before we start?
● Which dashboard will help us quickly find which part is
broken?

25. Playbook
Scenario #3
...In your next sprint planning
Ask:
● Did we add time for building a dashboard?
● Do you know how to measure the tasks impact?

26. Playbook
Scenario #4
...In your next code review
Ask:
● Which metrics this change is about to impact?
● If it's a performance enhancement - do we built a
dashboard so we could see the impact?
● Are there any logs that could help us if something will
go wrong?

27. Playbook
Scenario #5
...In your next demo
● Prove the impact of the change
○ Talk about the metricKPI
○ Show a dashboardfull story

28. Playbook
Scenario #6
...after your next crisis (knocking on wood)
Ask:
● Could we proactively identified the problem?
○ If so, which dashboard alert is missing?
● Which metricslogs could have helped us during the
crisis?
● Was there anything counter-productive?

29. Playbook
Scenario #7
...next time you ignore an alert in your slack channel
Ask:
● Can we remove this alert?
○ If not, can we improve it?
○ Can we add details in order to quickly identify the
importance?

30. Playbook
Scenario #8
What about having a usage party?
Every sprint one of the team members is hosting a usage
party, and shows some interesting usage data or patterns.
You can use this meetings to check how observable your
system is, by asking questions and trying to answer them
live.

31. WE ARE SCIENTISTS!

32. Thank you!
Summary
● Thinking about observability will benefit your system
● It's all around us - just look for it!
● Improve each tool as-you-go

33. Thank you!Thank You!