Observability Engineering: Achieving Production Excellence

by Charity Majors

Observability is the only way to engineer, manage, and improve the business-critical systems that customers depend on every day—and as the complexity of software grows, so does the need for observability. With this thoroughly revised second edition, authors Charity Majors, Liz Fong-Jones, and George Miranda take inventory of the current state of the field and explain how practitioners can evolve their observability practices from collecting separate, disparate signals to unified data workflows.


This book is for any software engineering team, large or small, that must understand the unique customer experience in order to ship quality code and features that customers want, at the right velocity. You'll discover the value that observable systems bring and learn concrete steps you can follow to achieve an observability-driven development practice yourself. And four completely new chapters explore recent trends such as large language models, frontend observability, cost optimization/performance engineering, and practical open source tooling.



Understand the impact observability has across the entire software development lifecycle
Learn how and why different functional teams use observability with service-level objectives
Implement modern observability practices in your organization
Maximize the cost-effectiveness of observability tooling
Produce quality code for context-aware system debugging and maintenance
Use data-rich analytics to quickly find answers when maintaining site reliability

629 pages, Paperback

Published July 21, 2026

Reviews

[Michael Koltsov · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the best books on observability, it's second edition delivers the AI update that feels so neccessary since the first book came out

The book has 2 parts than need to be considered in separation.

First, practical with lots of insights from the seasoned professionals in the field sharing their stories and best practices. I loved it, one of the best books I've read, it's kindled my interest to try other sides of observability I missed before. Lots of fun stories, easy to read.

Second, I'd title as "how to sell observability and hire people to put in the observability team". Feels forced and boring to read"

Overall score is going to be 3.5 as the first part gets the highest possible score and and the second part gets only 2.

Score 3/5

[Jade Lovelace · Rating 5 out of 5]

They put all the good opinions about effective observability into one book and I learned a bunch by reading it. Some of the sections have lightly claudy energy but the substance is very good. I appreciate the number of perspectives included, also.