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open-telemetry / opentelemetry.io

The OpenTelemetry website and documentation
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Details on "novel problems" you can handle with observability #1406

Open svrnm opened 2 years ago

svrnm commented 2 years ago

Follow up to #1401. The following sentence in the observability primer requires additional details (emphasis are mine):

Observability lets us understand a system from the outside, by letting us ask questions about that system without knowing its inner workings. Furthermore, allows us to easily troubleshoot and handle novel problems (i.e. “unknown unknowns”), and helps us answer the question, “Why is this happening?”

My suggestion is to have either a subsection on that page or (my preference) a subpage in concepts on the topic "problems you can solve with observability/OpenTelemetry" (or a more detailed "Why Observability?" "Why OpenTelemetry?")

There's a lot of writing on this topic out there from multiple vendors we can source for that. I would really like to see something comprehensive (and vendor neutral) on the OpenTelemetry page.

I am happy to get something started.

@cartermp , @avillela , @chalin , @austinlparker : thoughts?

avillela commented 2 years ago

@svrnm I very much like the idea of having a "Problems you can solve with Observability/OpenTelemetry" sub-page/sub-section.

cartermp commented 2 years ago

That'd be a good idea, yeah.

austinlparker commented 2 years ago

+1 to this, yes.

One thing I'd like for authors to be very circumspect about; Try to avoid 'about observability' verbiage that is overly... vendor-specific. "unknown unknowns" is an example of this.