Debugging with the Core Analysis Loop, and What to Buy vs Build

Summary:

Welcome to The Authors’ Cut Series
In this session, you’ll learn how it’s possible to resolve incidents quickly with the powerful and widely accessible core analysis loop of an observability tool—where anyone on the team can form hypotheses, validate or invalidate them with data, and thereby quickly and systematically arrive at the answer to a complex problem, no matter what their experience level is with the code.

Topics include:
- The Core Analysis Loop. How observability democratizes the analysis process from first principles and how to combine humans and computers to create effective debugging workflows. (Chapter 8)
- Build versus Buy and Return on Investment. Faced with the inevitability of the growing cost of commercial solutions, teams often consider saving money by building their own in-house observability solution. We will provide guidance on determining ROI and the approach that’s right for you. (Chapter 15)
- Efficient Data Storage. In order to achieve the functional requirements of iterative and open-ended investigations, data must be stored and retrieved according to specific technical criteria. We will provide guidance on building a data store suited to running observability workloads. (Chapter 16)
- A Live Honeycomb Demo. Honeycomb’s Jessica Kerr will provide a demo on debugging to show how an observability core analysis loop contrasts with workflows that rely on experience-based intuition. Based on this demonstration we’ll explore the pros and cons of building vs buying the elements of the loop.

About This Series
Welcome to The Authors’ Cut series. In writing the O’Reilly Observability Engineering book, our goal is to help you achieve production excellence, based on our experiences building and operating commercial SaaS products at scale, and as creators of observability tooling for high-performance engineering teams. These are interactive sessions led by authors Charity Majors, Liz Fong-Jones, and George Miranda where you’ll discuss concepts in the book, see how to apply them in Honeycomb, and get advice on strategy and implementation in your world.