Chapter 6 Observe Your Systems

Distributed Services with Go — by Travis Jeffery (44 / 84)

👈 What You Learned | TOC | Three Types of Telemetry Data 👉

Imagine waking up one day and noticing that the last hole in your belt doesn’t fit. You head to your scale and you see that you’ve gained a significant amount of weight overnight. You go on an emergency diet and fitness regimen. A couple of weeks later, you check the scales and see you gained even more weight somehow. What’s going on?

What you need is insight into what’s going on in your body. If our body had built-in observability, we’d have metrics on our body, like hormone levels that we could graph on a dashboard. If we could see a sudden imbalance in our hormone levels, with all things being equal, we could surmise that a hormonal imbalance must be the root cause. But without being able to see what had changed, you’d make many changes in search of the problem, each with their own effects.

We make our systems observable so we can we can ask questions that will give us insight into the system and debug unexpected problems. The keyword is unexpected — making our system observable means we can fix arbitrary problems that haven’t happened before. In this chapter, we’ll make our service observable so we understand what’s going on within it.

👈 What You Learned | TOC | Three Types of Telemetry Data 👉

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