| Thanks so much for this response! I've been thinking on your response for probably over an hour as I've been going about my day, and the thing that is sticking out to me is your directive to think critically about WHY I want observability. I think I figured out the motivation on why I'm looking into all of this stuff. I have a side business I'm working on that causes me to think about the customer experience a lot since it's a fully self-service, no-touch product where I'm not actively engaged in the sales, onboarding, etc. experience a new user has. When someone does have an issue, I want to be able to help them accomplish what they are trying to do as quickly as possible. I recently had a user/friend who was trying to get something set up in the application I'm building. The only reason I knew he had an issue was because he reached out to me. Luckily, when I finally saw his message 4-5 hours later, he was around and able to work with me on troubleshooting his issue. It took me a bit to troubleshoot exactly what was going on and the friend was very patient/helpful the entire time. I remember having him try to initiate his request probably a dozen or so times as I worked through my application and teasing out the root cause of his problem. Ultimately, this led to me building in better error messages into my application to address this specific point, but if there's a way to get ahead of the user issue whack-a-mole game, I'm all for it. Instead of him trying to reach out to me and us troubleshoot this issue together in real time, it would be more helpful to simply have had an Error Code and Request ID instead. This would allow me to instead tell him, "I dug into this and found out what's going on. Here's exactly what the issue is. Do X, Y, and Z to get this working." Other points that particularly resonate with me, although I may not consciously know why are: - JSON-structured logging - Visualizations could help sell the idea of observability at $DAYJOB (but no clue what would make for a good graph/diagram/etc.) - High-functioning teams want observability like high-functioning teams want automated testing. |