Kevin Sookocheff has some thoughts on building observable systems:
Given the shortcomings of monitoring and testing, we should shift focus to building observable systems. This means treating observability of system behaviour as a primary feature of the system being built, and integrating this feature into how we design, build, test, and maintain our systems. This also means acknowledging that the ease with which we can debug our production environment will be a key indicator of system reliability, scalability, and ultimately customer experience. Designing a system to be observable requires effort from three disciplines of software development: development, testing, and operations. None of these disciplines is more important than the others, and the sum of them is greater than the value of the individual parts. Let’s take some time to look at each discipline in more detail, with a focus on observability.
My struggle has never been with the concept, but rather with getting the implementation details right. “Make everything observable” is great until you run out of disk space because you’re logging everything.