Learn observability from the experts
Our systems are exploding in complexity. Observability, once regarded as a nice-to-have, is now a crucial tool engineering organizations must leverage in order to debug quickly and deliver a world-class customer experience.
Let authors Charity Majors, Liz Fong-Jones, and George Miranda show you what observability is and how to apply it successfully in your organization. Don’t wait—download your copy today.
Download your copy of Observability Engineering
The term “observability” has expanded from the corner of systems engineering to the foundation of software, SaaS, and AI development. As observability has gained notoriety, it has been confused with adjacent concepts like monitoring, visibility, and telemetry.
The book bridges both the theoretical and practical to provide examples of structured events to demonstrate the building blocks necessary for observability. Follow its lineage through core concepts like distributed tracing, iterative verification of hypotheses, and debugging from first principles with the core analysis loop.
What you’ll learn in the book
See clearly, build better
Understand the value of observability when managing complex cloud-native apps and systems.
Clarity for every engineer
See the impact observability has across the entire software engineering cycle.
Teamwork makes the SLOs work
Learn how different teams can work together to draft SLOs that work for both business and engineering.
From code to customer impact
Recognize how software developers contribute to the customer experience and business impact.
Debug with context
Produce quality code for context-aware debugging and maintenance.
Faster fixes with better telemetry
Leverage data-rich analytics to find answers quickly when maintaining site reliability.
Meet the authors of Observability Engineering
Charity Majors
Co-founder & CTO of Honeycomb
Charity pioneered the concept of modern observability, drawing on her years of experience building and managing massive distributed systems at Parse, Facebook, and Linden Lab.
She is the co-author of Observability Engineering and Database Reliability Engineering (O’Reilly).
She loves free speech, free software, and single malt scotch.
Liz Fong-Jones
Field CTO, Honeycomb
Liz is a developer advocate, labor and ethics organizer, and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with over two decades of experience. She is currently the Field CTO at Honeycomb, and previously was an SRE working on products ranging from the Google Cloud Load Balancer to Google Flights.
She lives in Vancouver, BC with her wife Elly, partners, and a Samoyed/Golden Retriever mix, and in Sydney, NSW. She plays classical piano, leads an EVE Online alliance, and advocates for transgender rights.
George Miranda
VP Marketing, InsightFinder AI
George is a former systems engineer now working to promote developer tools he believes in. Previously, he spent more than 15 years building large-scale distributed systems in the finance and video games industries.
In his free time, George likes to do things far less dangerous than getting into arguments about observability—like motorcycle racing and helicopter snowboarding.
What's next for Observability Engineering?
Second edition, coming in 2026
Three years ago, when we wrote Observability Engineering, the landscape was quite different. We’re proud to announce that the second edition of the book is coming in 2026, with 32 new chapters that cover issues like cost, governance, AI, and more.