- Observability Won’t Replace Monitoring (Because It Shouldn’t) - Ben Sigelman
- Observability — A 3-Year Retrospective - Charity Majors
- Monitoring and Observability - Cindy Sridharan
Observability is how you explain unknown-unknowns, that it’s about exploration and debugging instead of dashboards and pattern matching or accessing certain data types.
observability is impossible without:
- raw events
- high cardinality dimensions
- no pre-aggregation, no pre-indexing (which lock you into asking predefined questions)
- read time aggregation
- arbitrarily wide events
- schema-less-ness
- structured data
- oriented around the lifecycle of the request
- batched up context
- not metrics-based
- static dashboards don’t work, it must be exploratory
- etc.
On an side-ways related note, Entity Embeddings of Categorical Variables was referenced in a youtube talk about examining keyword profit analysis which is effectively high cardinality categorical data in a different context.