Key Principles for Implementing Observability in Large-Scale Systems

In her talk at Code BEAM Europe 2023, Natalia Chechina delves into observability, focusing on large-scale systems. The core of observability lies in understanding system performance, actions, inactions, and failures, providing the ability to preemptively tackle system limitations. Natalia emphasizes that metrics and logs should be designed into the system from the start rather than added later to avoid system overhead and useless data. She explains the differences between logs and metrics and offers rules of thumb for working with each, including the design, gradual implementation, and maintaining clean and efficient logging and metric practices. Additionally, Natalia covers the utilization of alarms to foresee potential issues. She underscores the importance of regularly revising and improving observability practices to keep systems efficient and reliable.