Summary

Charity Majors announces the near-completion of the second edition of 'Observability Engineering,' which is almost twice as long as the first despite Martin Fowler's advice to make it shorter. The new edition features 90% new material, a clearer mission focused on software engineers, and contributions from a diverse group of industry practitioners, reflecting how much the observability landscape has changed since 2018.

Key Insight

The observability landscape has transformed so dramatically since 2018—with OpenTelemetry winning, AI reshaping workflows, and the market co-opting the term—that a near-complete rewrite of the foundational book was necessary to reflect what observability actually means and requires today.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 6

  When we started the book in 2018, Honeycomb was the only observability company, and our definition of observability—high cardinality, high dimensionality, explorability—was the only definition. By the time the book came out in 2021, everyone was rebranding their products as observability, Gartner had waded into the fray.. it was a mess.

• 7

  Most companies still don't have real observability. And they don't know it.

• 7

  The integrations game is over, and OpenTelemetry has won.

• 2

  I am excited and incredibly grateful for the opportunity to take a second whack at this book in the era of AI.

Tone

enthusiastic, self-deprecating, candid