Is your observability stack just monitoring in disguise?

Not to scare you, but it could be.

In the third episode of Leading With Observability, Charity Majors sat down with Rick Clark, enterprise field CTO and Linux security expert with an extensive list of credentials to his name, to talk about o11ywashing.

If you've never heard the term before, 1) where have you been, and 2) it's essentially when vendors rename their monitoring tools to “observability” to position themselves better in the market, which leaves you—the poor customer—with a watered-down version of what you could get. High-cardinality context? Nope. Visualizations beyond dashboards? Nooope. Event-based pricing? Nope nope nope.

So, how do you make sure you get observability when you're paying observability prices? Watch the full episode now to find out. And if you missed the second episode with Dr. Cat Hicks, you can watch it here.

Watch the interview

Don't have time? Keep reading below for a short recap on the conversation.

The five tests

The easiest way Rick could provide on how to tell the difference between observability and monitoring is to put it through the five tests (which you can read more about in the second edition of Observability Engineering, where Rick wrote a chapter).

One of Rick's favorite tests is the arbitrary question test: Can you ask a question you didn't plan for ahead of time? If you have to know what's going to break before you can ask about it, that's monitoring.

The value of observability

Rick and Charity also touched on the value of observability and how you can measure it. Yes, budget reigns supreme, but Rick argues that its value transcends money. In actuality, observability should be tied to business outcomes like a reduction in support costs and customer calls.

Rick returns for more

Episode four of Leading With Observability will feature Rick once again (woohoo!), and this time we'll discuss whether it makes sense to build vs. buy when it comes to different observability scenarios and requirements. You won't want to miss this one.