Book Review: Learning OpenTelemetry – Monkeynoodle.Org
Book Review Content Corporate Life Customer Support fitness garmin Licensing Monitoring Observability Operations Partnership Product Management Products Sales Security User Experience
Slim volume packed with good stuff, I enjoyed this book. Notably, Observability is defined more practically as the practice of knowing what’s happening instead of the black box outputs definition.
There’s a good strong call out against MELT-style thinking. This is the idea that there’s three (or four, or N) silos of Observability. MELT’s a handy acronym for Metrics, Logs, and Traces. Somebody noticed the E and stuffed Events in, which is sort of like taking “Earth, Air, Fire, and Water” and sticking “Atoms” into it so you can have an acronym. Observability is not a stack of tools unless you’re selling a stack of tools. I laughed out loud at “The Three Browser Tabs of Observability.”
The chapter-leading quotes referencing maps and history in the first half of the book are very apropos. Lack of standardization, no unifying story, no map of the territory… that is the status quo and a problem, because users are presented with context-free data. OTel divides context into hard context (explicit relationships) and soft context (implicit relationships). Context links resources and transactions. Hard context is useful for a service map. Soft is useful for dimensional explanations.
