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Observability


OBSERVABILITY AS CODE SIMPLIFIES YOUR LIFE


THE BEST THING SINCE SLICED BREAD?

Published Jan 5, 2023 • 4 min read

By James Buchanan, Senior Solutions Architect

30,000 years. That's how long it took before someone invented a way to automate
the slicing of bread. Otto Frederick Rohwedder invented the first bread slicing
machine only relatively recently in 1928. So the phrase "best thing since sliced
bread" might not be as old as you imagine. 

With pre-sliced bread, you don’t need to get out a breadboard, find a knife,
slice a no-doubt wonky piece of bread, and clear up the crumbs afterward. Sliced
bread reduces your MTTT (mean time to toast) and generally improves your
breakfast experience.


DOUBLE, DOUBLE TOIL AND TROUBLE

Pre-sliced bread solves a simple problem: toil. 

Toil,  noun—very hard or unpleasant work, especially work that makes you feel
physically tired.

Others might call it tedium, labor, exertion, drudgery, and grind.

Whatever you call it, this toil is frustrating. Tedious chores are boring and
annoying. Laborious work causes errors and mistakes. Drudgery makes us look out
the window at greener grass. Struggle incites lethargy. Difficult and unpleasant
work slows us down. Toil is pain. Toil is a part of an evil spell cooked up by
witches. Toil is the enemy.

Whether it's slicing bread or configuring alerting thresholds, the more tedious
work that's involved, the less we want to do it. Coding might not be physical
work, but mental toil drains teams of energy physically. This can seriously
hamper those wanting to scale observability tools and practices across their
organizations as they navigate the change management “valley of despair.”


THE CHANGE MANAGEMENT VALLEY OF DESPAIR

Implementing any tool within a system inevitably incurs a certain amount of
debt. It's incredibly rare to deploy something that never needs updating or
maintaining, and observability tools are no different. As your platform and
products evolve, so must your observability tooling. Those alerts and dashboards
created when the product went live no longer make sense now the new feature has
shipped. How are you going to maintain them?

Here’s a common pattern I see, not just with observability tools but with any
new technology adopted. Perhaps it's familiar to you, too?


RAINBOWS AND UNICORNS

Excitable pioneering teams jump on the new tech like kids in a sweet shop
because it's shiny and new with tons of potential, installing and configuring it
to realize copious amounts of value and generally make their lives better.
Everything is set up and works like a dream. It’s all rainbows and unicorns
playing in the sun...


THE STORM MOVES IN

And then some time passes, the excitement wanes, and the storm clouds gather
over the valley of despair. There are so many things to change and update! New
teams eagerly looking in from the sidelines, who missed out on green-field
exploration and fun, become aware of the dark side. No fun and excitement for
them. It's hard work, it's out of date, and it's too much effort. It's toil, the
enemy!


AUTOMATING OBSERVABILITY IS THE ANTIDOTE TO TOIL

As we've learned from the bread slicer, we can combat toil with automation. A
New Relic-branded bread slicer probably won't help you much, but embracing
automation of your New Relic deployment will.

“Observability as code” is a term that shares a lot in common with the more
familiar  “infrastructure as code.” It represents a shift of intention: away
from a world of manual, toilsome administration to an auditable code-managed
solution that drastically reduces the work involved in maintaining and
developing a configuration.

Primarily through our graphQL APIs and in tandem with our Terraform provider,
you can manage your dashboards, incident workflows, synthetics, and pretty much
any other New Relic resource, through code.

The introduction of observability as code can drastically reduce the toil and
overhead in managing your New Relic deployment. No longer do skill-siloed
individuals need to make changes manually, pointing and clicking through
numerous screens leaving a trail of mistakes and errors as they go.

You can simplify settings and configuration then package and release them
together. The changes are auditable, historically documented, peer-reviewed, and
subject to an approval process just like your own development releases.

Sharing configuration, particularly by packaging it into shareable modules,
opens the door to considerably faster adoption by new teams. They can benefit
from the well-paved roads, experience, and skills of early adopters, so they can
deploy New Relic fast, with ease, and with a much lower bar to entry.

Observability as code reduces operational risk and improves ownership and
accountability. Also, if your industry is highly regulated, you might need to
leverage an observability as code deployment model to help meet your strict
compliance and audit obligations.

With observability as code, you are in a position to treat observability, the
development process, and the life cycles involved just like your own product
development. Observability becomes embedded into your everyday activities.


AUTOMATE EVERYTHING!

If you want observability to be as ubiquitous as sliced bread, then you need to
take a page from our friend Otto’s book and fully embrace automation through
observability as code.

Observability as code will help reduce toil, improve maintenance, and accelerate
observability adoption across your organization.

Treating your observability tooling like part of your product and ensuring it is
easy to maintain, update, and deploy will help you realize the value more widely
and improve your return on investment.

I encourage you to automate everything!


NEXT STEPS

To learn more about observability as code, see the guide to observability as
code on our docs site and learn more about using Terraform with New Relic .

To dig deeper, check out our blog series on New Relic and Terraform. You’ll
learn how to create dashboards with Terraform and JSON templates, dynamically
create New Relic dashboards with Terraform, and use Terraform to generate New
Relic dashboards from NRQL queries. No HCL required!

There are plenty of resources on our developer site that help you get started
with Terraform.


RELATED TOPICS

Observability

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By James Buchanan, Senior Solutions Architect

James Buchanan is a Senior Solutions Architect at New Relic.

The views expressed on this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the views of New Relic. Any solutions offered by the author are
environment-specific and not part of the commercial solutions or support offered
by New Relic. Please join us exclusively at the Explorers Hub
(discuss.newrelic.com) for questions and support related to this blog post. This
blog may contain links to content on third-party sites. By providing such links,
New Relic does not adopt, guarantee, approve or endorse the information, views
or products available on such sites.

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In this article
 * Double, double toil and trouble
 * The change management valley of despair
 * Automating observability is the antidote to toil
 * Automate everything!
 * Next steps


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