Observability Engineering Book - Charity Majors

Charity Majors and her co-authors revolutionized how we think about production systems with this comprehensive guide to observability. Moving beyond traditional monitoring's "known unknowns," observability helps you understand the "unknown unknowns" in complex distributed systems.

The book distinguishes observability from monitoring: monitoring watches for known problems, observability lets you ask new questions. Instead of dashboards full of metrics, observability provides high-cardinality, high-dimensionality data that lets you slice and dice to find problems you didn't know existed.

Core concepts include the three pillars (logs, metrics, traces) and why they're not enough, structured events as the foundation of observability, the importance of high-cardinality fields, and debugging production issues without reproducing them.

Practical topics cover building observable systems from the start, choosing what to instrument and when, using observability to speed up deployments, and creating a culture where everyone owns production.

For technical leaders, this book explains why traditional monitoring fails in modern systems and provides a roadmap for building systems that can be understood, debugged, and evolved with confidence.