Why we wrote this book

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the authors’ raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

If you have comments about how we might improve the content and/or examples in this book, or if you notice missing material within this chapter, please reach out to the editor at vwilson@oreilly.com.

Thank you for picking up our book on observability engineering for modern software systems. Our goal is to help you understand how to develop a practice of observability within your engineering organization. This book is based on our experience as practitioners of observability, and as makers of observability tooling for users who want to improve their own observability practices.

As outspoken advocates for driving observability practices in software engineering, our hope is that this book can set a clear record of what observability means in the context of modern software systems. The term “observability” has seen quite a bit of recent uptake in the software development ecosystem. This book aims to help you separate facts from hype by providing a deep analysis of: