Engineer Explains: What is observability in less than 5 mins

Antonija Bilic Arar

We've asked experienced engineers to share how they would explain some tech terminology at three levels of experience - from junior developer to CTO.

What is observability, and how is it different from monitoring?!

There is no shortage of definitions of observability online. In one way or another, all of them say it’s the ability to measure a system’s current state based on data collected from that system to proactively approach troubleshooting or optimize the system. But it’s not a “set and forget” practice and can easily result in multi-million dollar vendor bills.

We’ve asked Eric D. Schabell, Director of Evangelism at Chronosphere, to explain what observability looks like in practice for a junior developer, senior developer, and a CTO.

This video is a part of ShiftMag’s video series, Engineer Explains.

We’ve asked experienced engineers to share how they would explain some basic and some less basic tech terminology to different tech job titles or at three levels of experience — from junior developer to CTO.

More:
How would you explain APIsinternal developer platformssoftware architecturesoftware testingscaling infrastructure without breaking the bank,  low-code as a dev toolwhat is a database, Network APIs or Developer Relations at three levels of experience?

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