Culture
June 8

Why is building observability platform (still) so hard?

Any organization seriously pursuing "you write it, you run it" in 2023 is probably considering platform engineering. Observability is a necessary part of that strategy, but building the right observability platform for an organization is (still) hard. Why?
Talk abstract

Observability is a key aspect of every platform engineering strategy, but it remains very difficult to create and maintain the observability-specific parts of an Internal Developer Platform.

This talk will look at three fundamental aspects of observability that render useless platform tools and techniques that are effective in other areas:

  • Insight: observability's unobservable goal
  • Mere mortals need to see the data they're observing to be confident in their changes—which means GUIs, not text editors
  • There's just a _lot_ to configure, and as-code tooling isn't sharp enough to let platform team(s) divide and conquer