Demanding Answers from Production Systems

Red Hat X Podcast Series

There are many definitions of Observability that are thrown around. Some definitions reference control theory. We take the more pragmatic approach advocated by Bryan Cantrill as the “capability to allow a human to ask and answer questions.” As such, when creating a new system or wrangling long-standing systems, discovering the questions that we want to ask systems has been a valuable exercise. So often, we jump to the tools or implementation without taking a step back and looking at what we are trying to accomplish.
One of the key questions that many of us want answered for our system is where an application was spending the most time in its flow of execution. In order to answer that question, NGINX embarked on a journey to integrate Open Telemetry with their application's Modern App Reference Architecture (MARA).