Authors’ Cut—Structured Events Are the Basis of Observability

Observability is defined as the ability to understand the internal state of systems based on their telemetry, aiding in troubleshooting, debugging, and performance tuning, which is often misunderstood as merely a collection of logs, metrics, and traces. Honeycomb advocates for using structured events as the foundation for observability, enabling the visualization of trends and patterns through traces composed of these events, offering a more comprehensive view than traditional methods. The approach emphasizes the use of arbitrarily wide structured events, which provide detailed data for effective debugging and analysis, as opposed to the fragmented insights from metrics, logs, and traces. Honeycomb's platform facilitates the storage and querying of raw data, preserving context and granularity, and supports distributed tracing to track requests across microservices, enhancing the understanding of system performance and failure points. The use of OpenTelemetry for instrumentation is recommended to generate telemetry data, avoiding vendor lock-in and ensuring compatibility with various backend stores, including Honeycomb, as discussed in their webinar series and O’Reilly’s "Observability Engineering" book.