Tech Lead Journal

#88 - Observability Engineering - Liz Fong-Jones


Listen Later

“Observability is a technique for ensuring that you can understand novel problems in your system. Can you understand what’s happening in your system and why, without having to push a new code by slicing and dicing existing telemetry signals that are coming out of your system?"

Liz Fong-Jones is the co-author of the “Observability Engineering” book and a Principal Developer Advocate for SRE and Observability at Honeycomb. In this episode, Liz shared in-depth about observability and why it is becoming an important practice in the industry nowadays. Liz started by explaining the fundamentals of observability and how it differs from traditional monitoring. She explained some important concepts, such as the core analysis loop, cardinality and dimensionality, and doing debugging from a first principle. Later, Liz shared the current state of observability and how we can improve our observability by doing observability driven development and improving our practices based on the proposed observability maturity model found in the book.

Listen out for:

  • Career Journey - [00:05:44]
  • Observability - [00:06:30]
  • Pillars of Observability - [00:09:57]
  • Monitoring and SLO - [00:12:28]
  • Core Analysis Loop - [00:15:06]
  • Cardinality and Dimensionality - [00:18:41]
  • Debugging from First Principle - [00:21:20]
  • Current State of Observability - [00:26:49]
  • Implementing Observability - [00:30:20]
  • Observability Driven Development - [00:36:53]
  • Having Developers On-Call - [00:39:06]
  • Observability Maturity Model - [00:41:59]
  • 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:44:10]
  • _____

    Liz Fong-Jones’s Bio

    Liz is a developer advocate, labor and ethics organizer, and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with 17+ years of experience. She is an advocate at Honeycomb for the SRE and Observability communities, and previously was an SRE working on products ranging from the Google Cloud Load Balancer to Google Flights. She lives in Vancouver, BC with her wife Elly, partners, and a Samoyed/Golden Retriever mix, and in Sydney, NSW. She plays classical piano, leads an EVE Online alliance, and advocates for transgender rights.

    Follow Liz:

    • Twitter – @lizthegrey
    • LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/efong/
    • Website – https://www.lizthegrey.com/
    • GitHub – https://github.com/lizthegrey

    • Our Sponsor

      Today’s episode is proudly sponsored by Skills Matter, the global community and events platform for software professionals.

      Skills Matter is an easier way for technologists to grow their careers by connecting you and your peers with the best-in-class tech industry experts and communities. You get on-demand access to their latest content, thought leadership insights as well as the exciting schedule of tech events running across all time zones.
      Head on over to skillsmatter.com to become part of the tech community that matters most to you - it’s free to join and easy to keep up with the latest tech trends.


      Like this episode?

      Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback.
      Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.
      Pledge your support by becoming a patron.
      For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/88.

      ...more
      View all episodesView all episodes
      Download on the App Store

      Tech Lead JournalBy Henry Suryawirawan

      • 4.7
      • 4.7
      • 4.7
      • 4.7
      • 4.7

      4.7

      14 ratings


      More shows like Tech Lead Journal

      View all
      The Knowledge Project by Shane Parrish

      The Knowledge Project

      2,672 Listeners

      Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers by team@se-radio.net (SE-Radio Team)

      Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

      273 Listeners

      The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source by Changelog Media

      The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

      288 Listeners

      Software Engineering Daily by Software Engineering Daily

      Software Engineering Daily

      626 Listeners

      Talk Python To Me by Michael Kennedy

      Talk Python To Me

      583 Listeners

      Soft Skills Engineering by Jamison Dance and Dave Smith

      Soft Skills Engineering

      287 Listeners

      Thoughtworks Technology Podcast by Thoughtworks

      Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

      44 Listeners

      The InfoQ Podcast by InfoQ

      The InfoQ Podcast

      38 Listeners

      Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats by Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski - Full Stack JavaScript Web Developers

      Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats

      985 Listeners

      Today, Explained by Vox

      Today, Explained

      10,331 Listeners

      The Stack Overflow Podcast by The Stack Overflow Podcast

      The Stack Overflow Podcast

      63 Listeners

      The Big Take by Bloomberg

      The Big Take

      155 Listeners

      科技工作講 Tech Job N Talk by Tech Job N Talk 科技工作講

      科技工作講 Tech Job N Talk

      24 Listeners

      HBR On Leadership by Harvard Business Review

      HBR On Leadership

      170 Listeners

      The Pragmatic Engineer by Gergely Orosz

      The Pragmatic Engineer

      77 Listeners