Grab your copy of Observability Engineering, 2nd Edition
Observability has changed a lot over the past four years: OpenTelemetry adoption has skyrocketed, governance and cost have become pressing concerns, and AI has reshaped the landscape of software delivery.
We’re proud to announce the second edition of Observability Engineering is here—almost entirely rewritten and twice as long, with material for both software engineers and engineering leaders.
What’s new in the second edition?
Here’s a preview of what’s included:
- Introduction to observability
- A guide to building and understanding your code using observability, both with and without AI
- An entirely new section on observability governance for technical decision-makers: CTOs, VPs, directors, and staff+ engineers
- Guest contributions from Boris Tane, Phillip Carter, Kesha Mykhailov, Darragh Curran, and Hazel Weakly
- 27 net-new chapters
What you’ll learn in the book
See clearly, build better
Understand the value of observability when managing complex cloud-native apps and systems.
Instrumentation for AI agents
Learn best practices for instrumenting nondeterministic workloads in production
Teamwork makes the SLOs work
Learn how different teams can work together to draft SLOs that work for both business and engineering.
From code to customer impact
Recognize how software developers contribute to the customer experience and business impact.
Build faster with visibility
You need to be able to see where you are going if you want to build swiftly, with confidence—AI or no AI
Faster fixes with better telemetry
Leverage data-rich analytics to find answers quickly when maintaining site reliability.
Meet the authors of Observability Engineering
Charity Majors
is the Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb. She pioneered the concept of modern observability, drawing on her years of experience building and managing massive distributed systems at Parse, Facebook, and Linden Lab. She is the co-author of Observability Engineering and Database Reliability Engineering (O’Reilly).
She loves free speech, free software, and single malt scotch.
Liz Fong-Jones
is a developer advocate, labor and ethics organizer, and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with over two decades of experience. She is currently Technical Fellow at Honeycomb, and previously was an SRE working on products ranging from the Google Cloud Load Balancer to Google Flights.
She plays classical piano, leads an EVE Online alliance, and advocates for transgender rights.
George Miranda
is VP Marketing at InsightFinder AI. He's a former systems engineer now working to promote developer tools he believes in. Previously, he spent more than 15 years building large-scale distributed systems in the finance and video games industries.
In his free time, George likes to do things far less dangerous than getting into arguments about observability, like motorcycle racing and helicopter snowboarding.
Austin Parker
is Director of AI Strategy at Honeycomb, where he leads forward-looking bets on how AI changes the way engineers understand their systems. He is a co-founder of the OpenTelemetry project, serves on its Governance Committee, and co-chairs Observability Day at KubeCon. He is the co-author of Learning OpenTelemetry and Distributed Tracing in Practice (O'Reilly).
In his spare time, he builds things on the AT Protocol and posts about it, which is arguably the same hobby twice.
At a moment when AI is changing everything about the way software gets designed, built, and understood, first principles matter more than ever. First among them is observability: the ability to validate your changes and understand how users experience your code in production. This book is for teams in transition.
