Honeycomb is one of the companies at the forefront of championing the importance of observability, so we sat with Jessica at CraftConference and asked her to share her knowledge about some of the most often mentioned terms in observability.

What is OpenTelemetry?

Observability starts with collecting data, and OpenTelemetry is a standard, open-source, and vendor-neutral way to do so. Or, as Jessica says, it’s just some libraries that help us know what our code is doing in production.

What is Observability 2.0?

It’s easier to explain Observability 2.0 to juniors, Jessica says, as they usually don’t have much previous knowledge of observability. What they need to know is that Observability 2.0 is the modern way how to make your software talk to you.

As a developer, you get to take the responsibility of what you need to know about what the software is doing in production. You can’t say that’s something operations has to worry about!

You have to have a way to know whether features you have implemented impact your users.

For senior developers, Observability 2.0 is a much harder change because it’s different from what they have known for a decade or even two.

But Observability 2.0 makes it easier for developers:

“Instead of looking at metrics and logs as just a bunch of disconnected statements, it builds distributed tracing into our software so that we can modify it and add to it pieces of information that are the most important for us to know, like what customer this was for, what infrastructure it ran on, what the errors are, and what the causal chain of those errors is.

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 videos from the Engineer Explains series:

• Feature Flags Explained
• JAMstack Explained
• Observability Explained
• Large Language Models Explained
• DevOps Explained
• DevRel Explained
• Network APIs Explained
• Verifiable Credential Explained
• Mob Programming Explained
• Machine Learning Explained
• RUST Explained
• Career Tips for Tough Times ft. ‪Pragmatic Engineer‬

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