Building Observability Teams and Developing In-House Expertise

Why does observability fall into developer experience rather than operations? Like testability, reliability, and accessibility, observability is a property of software systems. These practices require continuous investment rather than being a one-time addition, or having a one-size-fits-all solution. As they improve, benefits accrue for the developers that platform engineering teams serve, and for end users of your systems. Increasingly diverse organizations are adopting observability and rolling it out across their teams using a platform engineering mindset.

If you’re trying to move your company from the operational model to the upstream, faster feedback loops, unified storage model, this guide is about the organizational decisions you’ll need to make to set your teams up for success. And as a bonus, these changes also help you achieve your dual mandate of serving the business as well as your developers by unlocking the ability of non-developers to easily access data on key business metrics without having to guess what the "right way" is to look up the data.