Observability is just as important as unit tests, and operational skills – debugging between services and components, degrading gracefully, writing maintainable code and valuing simplicity – are becoming non-negotiable for senior software engineers. This means engineers must be comfortable and confident breaking systems, understanding them, experimenting, and fixing them.

As a result, developers need to have deeper visibility into what their code is doing in production, a stronger connection to the end user experience, and how production issues affect individual users of the service. What is needed is observability.

This guide provides the means to measure your current level of observability practice and how to get to the next level. It goes into detail about not just why, but how you can implement observability as an integral part of your development process and culture.

Want an introduction to Observability first? Start with “Achieving Observability”.