How “deep systems” broke observability … and what we can do about it

Ben Sigelman, CEO and Cofounder, LightStep
Large-scale systems aren’t simply larger versions of small-scale systems — they are something completely different. Enter the deep system. Deep systems aren’t merely larger; they’re orders of magnitude more elaborate. In fact, they are so much more structurally complex that they deserve their own category. They are distributed, they are layered, they are concurrent, they are multi-tenant, they change continuously, and they are extremely difficult to observe. Once ordinary systems become deep systems, cookie-cutter observability falls over. The transition from a shallow system to a deep system is often abrupt: You don’t realize you are operating a deep system until the day you receive a bug report and have no idea which service could be responsible.

Ben walks through the design and natural evolution of deep systems and explains why conventional metrics-first approaches to observability break down along the way. He also shows why distributed tracing should become the backbone for observability in deep systems at scale.