Observability, Monitoring, and Platform Engineering with Abigail Bangser

Quality Bits

What's the difference between observability and monitoring? What's a telemetry? Why do they matter, and how could we use them more beneficially?
Abby Bangser shares her journey from a QA to a platform engineer in this episode. We discuss the similarities between testing and infrastructure-related areas like site reliability engineering. In addition, Abby explains observability and shares some sound advice regarding implementing it.
Find Abby on:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abbybangser/
- Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@abangser
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/a_bangser

Mentions and resources:

• Abby's talk on measuring quality in production at Ministry of Testing (free sign up is enough to access it): https://www.ministryoftesting.com/talks/567372c2?s_id=14698896
• Abby's course on Test Automation University - Introduction to Observability for Test Automation: https://testautomationu.applitools.com/observability-for-test-automation/
• ThoughtWorks graph showing different roles and overlaps by Laura Paterson
• Some more fun readings suggested by Abby:
  • https://oschvr.com/posts/what-id-like-as-sre/
  • https://blog.alicegoldfuss.com/how-to-get-into-sre/
  • https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2021/08/13/root-cause-of-failure-root-cause-of-success/
  • https://www.learningfromincidents.io/
  • https://kratix.io
  • cncf.io/blog/2023/04/11/announcing-a-white-paper-on-platforms-for-cloud-native-computing/
  • https://www.syntasso.io/post/the-12-platform-challenges-recap

If you liked this episode, you may enjoy this one:
Testing in Production with Rouan Wilsenach https://www.buzzsprout.com/2037134/11623978

Follow Quality Bits host Lina Zubyte on:
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/buggylina
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/linazubyte/
- Website: https://qualitybits.tech/
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Thank you for listening!

Chapters

1. Observability, Monitoring, and Platform Engineering with Abigail Bangser (00:00:00)

2. From QA to SRE to Platform Engineer: Abby's career progression origins (00:02:43)

3. What is platform engineering? (00:09:09)

4. Observability vs. monitoring and what is a telemetry (00:11:43)

5. Benefits from having observability practices in place (00:18:57)

6. Selling the idea of observability to stakeholders (00:20:37)

7. Tips on starting on observability and monitoring (00:25:43)

8. Alert fatigue: how to fight it? (00:27:54)

9. You find an issue in prod: how do you debug it? (00:31:02)

10. Example of using observability to find issues and improve your product (00:34:57)

11. Abby's advice on building high-quality products and teams (00:38:09)