Kill Three Pillars

Let's remove a relic of a bygone age from observability. #kill3pill

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Not Three Pillars. Three Data Types.

Traditional wisdom says that observability is three pillars - traces, logs and metrics. This is nonsense.

Traces, logs and metrics are data types, not pillars.

Imagine if we said "software engineering is three pillars - strings, integers and arrays". That would be patently absurd.

The three data types are an implementation detail.

What is observability?

As Ben Sigelman says, observability has two use cases:

1. Release with confidence
2. Minimise SLO violations

The key to this - context aware, wide events.

Articles

The alternative to the three pillars is context aware, wide events. No silos. Treating observability data as plain old data. Want to know more? Read on.

The "Three Pillars of observability" that weren’t. Ben Sigelman.

Metrics, Logs, and Traces are not "the three pillars of observability." They are just the raw materials — the *telemetry* — and we must reframe our discussion of observability around use cases and problems-to-solve.
Read Now

The Cost Crisis in Observability Tooling. Charity Majors.

Why the cost of tools built atop the three pillars of metrics, logs, and traces - observability 1.0 tooling - is not only soaring at a rate many times higher than your traffic increases, but has also become radically disconnected from the value those tools can deliver. Too often, as costs go up, the value you derive from these tools declines.
Read Now

Event Foo: A Series of Unfortunate/Incredible Events. Charity Majors.

What makes an event useful or good? What makes it not-useful, or even deceptive? Instead of assuming full knowledge, let’s assume none and start from scratch. We have invited some of our favorite people to start at the beginning and unpack their experience and understanding of how to debug with structured log events. Enjoy.
Read Now

Stop sending metrics. Start deriving them. John Gallagher.

Metrics aren't that useful. Unless they're derived from deeper sources of information.
Read Now

Vendors

Welcome to the revolution of context aware, wide events. Here are the companies leading the charge with the latest generation of observability tooling.

  • Honeycomb

    Answer novel questions about your ever-evolving cloud applications. Honeycomb enables you to deploy confidently and resolve incidents faster.

    Visit

  • Service Now (LightStep)

    Gain insights to detect and quickly respond to changes in cloud-native and monolithic applications.

    Go to website

  • Another Innovative Company

    There must be other observability 2.0 vendors out there. Get in touch with the form below to be featured here.

Our Partners

 We are proud to work with these industry leaders. 

Sign The Manifesto

Agree that the three pillars are nonsense and context aware wide events are the way forwards for observability? Sign the manifesto today.

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Manifesto Signatories

Charity Majors 

Mike Lee 

Sina Ziaei 

Ilya Sakharov 

Michele Sollecito 

FAQ

Rethinking Observability with Ben Sigelman

Ben Sigelman, Co-founder and CEO of LightStep, looks at how contemporary dogma about "Observability" centers on "the three pillars": metrics, logging, and tracing.

We agree that these are all important ingredients, but we see company after company check those three boxes and remain dissatisfied. Ben looks at what these companies are missing, and what's a better way of thinking about the problem and solution.  

Thanks!

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