Guest: Yarden Laifenfeld (LinkedIn)
Company: Rookout (Twitter)
Show: TFiR: T3M

For Rookout, observability is all about helping developers get insights into what’s happening in their production, staging, or running environments. How can observability help developers and how can developers use observability to their advantage?

In this episode of TFiR: T3M, Rookout Software Engineer Yarden Laifenfeld shares the company’s focus when developing observability tools.

Current trends in the market:

• A lot of basic observability tools are used mainly to monitor and see what’s going on. If deploying to a remote environment, the only way to know what’s going on there is maybe to SSH (Secure Shell) over and start probing it.
• The biggest challenge for developers is shifting from that black box mindset of “I deploy something, and it just happens” to “I can actually get data from what’s happening as it’s happening” and “I can look at metrics to improve the way we work.”
• The more advanced tooling helps developers see what’s happening in what used to be black boxes. Advanced observability tools take a proactive stance and get insights dynamically without having to redeploy.

The Rookout difference:

• It tries to stay in the developer comfort zone, i.e., their integrated development environment (IDE). Since the developers know all the features that they need and they are very efficient with it, Rookout is bringing observability to the IDE, instead of changing the IDE to support observability. It has the same terminology, a live debugger, and has breakpoints in production.

Why should companies deploy observability tools now?

• Most observability tools, especially SaaS-based ones, are pretty easy to implement.
• There’s almost instant value because they provide tremendous help with production issues (bugs, performance, memory, etc.).

Advice for companies looking to adopt observability tools and practices:

• There are a lot of open-source observability tools out there and there is a big community. Read the documentations, talk to the community, and learn from success stories of other people.

What’s ahead:

• Observability tools and dev tools are going to be veering towards helping AI workloads. AI is an even bigger black box because we don’t know the neural pathways that are going on in there and we don’t know why it’s making those decisions. If we could bring observability to that, we can see the steps where it’s made the decision and how it affects the flow later on in the code.
• There will be a lot more invasive observability. Rookout and other tools like it have been the first to go in the direction of not even asking the developer, in some sense. OpenTelemetry has auto-instrumentation. It will tell you what you need before you even know that you need it.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.