The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

by Gene Kim

Other negative outcomes due to lack of public telemetry include a highly charged political atmosphere, the need to deflect accusations, and, worse, the inability to create institutional knowledge around how the incidents occurred and the learnings needed to prevent these errors from happening again in the future.§ In contrast, telemetry enables us to use the scientific method to formulate hypotheses about what is causing a particular problem and what is required to solve it. Examples of questions we can answer during problem resolution include: What evidence do we have from our monitoring that a problem is actually occurring? What are the relevant events and changes in our applications and environments that could have contributed to the problem? What hypotheses can we formulate to confirm the link between the proposed causes and effects? How can we prove which of these hypotheses are correct and successfully effect a fix?