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 APIs, internal developer platforms, software architecture, software testing, scaling infrastructure without breaking the bank,  low-code as a dev tool, what is a database, Network APIs or Developer Relations at three levels of experience?

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“The tooling or framework is not going to have the impact on 2024 that I think the stress, pressures, and eventual burnout are going to have on developers in the cloud-native world in 2024”, says Eric D. Schabell, Director of Technical Marketing & Evangelism at Chronosphere, a cloud-native observability tool.

He believes this will lead not only to unhappy developers but also fuel career movements as they seek more satisfying and happy workplaces in 2024.

Eric has also published his predictions for emerging trends in 2024 on his blog, and this is his list of the most important trends for the year.

Prioritizing mental health

In his blog post, Eric highlighted several trends he believes will shape the industry in 2024. One of them is the focus on cloud-native burnout.

Every role, from Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), DevOps, engineers, developers, and managing any part of the cloud-native engineering experience within an organization. They all resonated with this being the number one theme out there.

According to research in a 2023 Cloud Native Observability Report, which Schabel refers to in his blog post, and which surveyed over 500 engineers and developers:

• They spend 10 hours on average – a quarter of their 40-hour work week, trying to triage and understand incidents
• 88% reporting the amount of time spent on issues negatively impacts them and their careers
• 39% admit they are frequently stressed out
• 22% said they want to quit

Because of that, Eric’s prediction is that the attention this topic got in 2023 will expand and deepen into all areas where organizations are trying to grow their cloud-native footprints:

“In 2024 we will hear more about burnout-related stress, hear more ideas on how to solve it, and see it become one of the biggest topics of conversation at events, online, and at the coffee machine”.

High stress = high turnover rate

The stress and burn-out discussed in the first prediction are expected to lead to increased career movement, thinks Schabell. High levels of stress, burnout, and pressures in cloud-native organizations contribute to high turnover rates.

I predict a surge of career movement. Over 25% of current tech roles will take the plunge and try to find fulfillment in now roles, new organizations and take on new opportunities.

Focus on cloud-native cost management

Since its inception in early 2019 and subsequent integration into the Linux Foundation in 2020, the FinOps Foundation has evolved into a crucial entity for both cloud-native and cloud-utilizing organizations. Throughout 2022 and 2023, organizations have increasingly recognized the necessity of deriving value from every dollar spent on cloud-native services.

Along these lines the FinOps Foundation has become the central gathering place for practitioners in the FinOps role across all kinds of organizations. 

His prediction is that the continued growth seen in the field of FinOps in 2023 in cloud-native organizations will evolve in 2024 into a permanent value-add for more and more organizations.

“CIOs, CFOs, and CTOs are going to lean more in 2024 on the FinOps roles, processes, and education to manage their cloud-native spend to ensure the value per dollar spent continues to have impact on their cloud-native investments”, says Schabell.

Read more:
What is developer burnout and how to prevent it
How to implement FinOps

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