Ruby Rogues
Practical Observability: Logging, Tracing, and Metrics for Better Debugging - RUBY 656
Wed, 16 Oct 2024
Today, they dive deep into the world of observability in programming, particularly within Rails applications, with special guest, John Gallagher. Valentino openly shares his struggles with engineering challenges and the frustration of recurring issues in his company's customer account app. They explore a five-step process Valentino has developed to tackle these problems and emphasize the critical role of defining use cases and focusing on relevant data for effective observability.In this episode, they talk about the emotional journey of dealing with bugs, the importance of capturing every event within an app, and why metrics, logs, and tracing each play a unique role in debugging. They also touch on tools like Datadog, New Relic, and OpenTelemetry, discussing their practical applications and limitations. Valentino and John shed light on how structured logging, tracing, and the concept of high cardinality attributes can transform debugging experiences, ultimately aiming for a more intuitive and robust approach to observability.Join them as they delve into the nexus of frustration, learning, and technological solutions, offering valuable insights for every developer striving to improve their application's resilience and performance.SocialsLinkedIn: John GallagherBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/ruby-rogues--6102073/support.
Full Episode
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,
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