Maximizing Your Observability

Dan Goslen
6 min readSep 21, 2023
Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash

Do you know if your code is working in production?

If you can’t answer that question with a confident “Yes, it is” or “No, it’s not,” your software system isn’t complete.

In today’s complex software landscape, we need to know whether our code is working correctly. And we need to know quickly to be able to have 3 or 4 nines (or more!) availability.

And observability patterns, tools, and techniques are how you get there. Observability has become the term used throughout the industry to encapsulate logs, captured errors, metrics, alerting, and other reporting metrics to observe what our systems are doing.

But observability doesn’t just stop at being a grab-bag of tools to trigger Pagerduty when something is wrong.

Instead, we can harness these techniques to help us build better software vs. constantly scrambling to put out fires.

When used correctly, your observability dashboards and systems can tell you where to spend your resources for the next iteration, teach you how your system is actually operating, and even be a place to test ideas quickly to influence the product roadmap.

Here are some ways observability can help you and your team and mazimize it’s value to you.

Show You Where to Optimize

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Dan Goslen
Dan Goslen

Written by Dan Goslen

Jesus follower | Husband | Dad | Software engineer. Helping devs build better teams