Practical Observability: Logging, Tracing, and Metrics for Better Debugging - RUBY 656
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Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Ruby Rogues podcast. I am your host today, Valentino Stoll, and we are joined by a very special guest today, John Gallagher. John, can you introduce yourself and tell everybody a little bit about yourself and why we had you on today?
Sure. Thanks for having me on. My name is John Gallagher, and I am a senior engineer at I had a company called BiggerPockets, and we teach how to invest in real estate based in the US. And I also run my own business on the side called Joyful Programming to introduce more joy to the world of programming. And I'm on today to talk a bit about observability, which is one of my many passions. I'm a bit of a polymath. This is one of the things that is really, really important to me and I'm passionate about. I'm particularly passionate about introducing this into Rails apps. So thanks for having me on.
Yeah, and thank you for all the joy you're bringing to people, I hope. You definitely picked the right language, Ruby. If you're not familiar with this podcast, Ruby is a very joyful experience personally. So it's very cool. I love... I've loved been digging into all of the observability talk that you have on joyful programming. And it's kind of a very important topic that I feel is definitely kind of... overlooked if you're starting up um maybe you get some like you know bug alerting or something like that in place as like a standard but kind of anything performance monitoring wise is kind of like a oh no like something happened let's look into it now i feel like it's like the the typical uh
uh, flow of things, uh, as people start up. Um, do you want to just give us like a high level, like what is observability and why should we care? Uh, what, you know, we could drill into the details of it after.
Well, um, I don't actually think anybody should care about observability and I don't care about observability as a thing because it's just a means to an end. And what's the actual goal. Um, Doesn't matter how you get there, but the goal is being able to, number one, understand your Rails app in production, and number two, be able to ask unusual questions. Not questions that you've thought of a day, two days, three weeks ago, because that's not really very useful or interesting. If we knew exactly the questions to ask in the future of our apps, everything would be easy. Just be like, how many 200s have we had in the last week? It's kind of a boring question to ask. Maybe a bit useful. I find the more obvious the question, the less useful it is.
So observability is the practice of making a black box system more transparent. So I like to think of it, imagine your entire Rails app, all the hosting, everything to do with that app is wrapped up in an opaque black box. And somebody says, how does it work? And why is this thing going wrong? You would have no hope of understanding it. If the box is completely translucent, And you can see everything, which of course is completely impossible in software. But in theory, you'd have this completely translucent box and you can ask all these questions and you get instant answers. That's like 100% observability. And of course, that is absolutely impossible. And so what we're trying to do with observability is understand what is going on, not just when it goes wrong, although that's the obvious use case, is we have an incident, the most critical point where observability comes into play is an exact scenario that I landed in two weeks into a new role I had. So it was two weeks in, the site had gone down,
I am in the UK, and the rest of my team were in the US, and there were two other engineers in my time zone. And all of us had been at the company for a total of five weeks. So we've got this app. It's down. It's on fire. And we need to put the fire out. And the three of us looked at each other. We were like, should we just restart the dynos? Yeah. So we restarted the dynos. We crossed our fingers. And it was pure luck that the app came back up. That is the exact opposite of what we want. And we've now moved to a situation where we can ask our app a whole load of very unusual questions. And we will get an answer to that. Why are there a peak of 404s on iOS at 3 a.m.? Looks like a lot of them are coming from this IP address.
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