The OODA loop emphasizes two critical environmental factors - time constraints and information uncertainty. The time factor is addressed by executing through the loop as fast as possible. Information uncertainty is tackled by acting accurately. The model's typical presentation is popular because it closes the loop between sensing (observe and orient) and acting (decide and act).
Author: William David Louth
From Data to Dashboard
Data and information are not surrogates for a model. Likewise, a model is not a dashboard built lazily and naively on top of a lake of data and information. A dashboard and many metrics, traces, and logs that come with it are not what constitutes a situation. A situation is formed and shaped by changing signals and states of structures and processes within an environment of nested contexts (observation points of assessment) – past, present, and predicted.
Verbal Protocol Analysis for Observability
VPA is a technique used by researchers across many domains, including psychology, engineering, and architecture. The basic idea is that during a task, such as solving a problem, a subject will concurrently verbalize, think aloud, what is resident in their working memory - what they are thinking during the doing. Using Protocol Analysis, researchers can elicit the cognitive processes from start to completion of a task. After further processing, the information captured is analyzed to provide insights that can improve performance.
Streamlining Observability Pipelines
The next generation of Observability technologies and tooling will most likely take two distinctly different trajectories from the ever-faltering middle ground that distributed tracing and event logging currently represent. The first trajectory, the high-value road, will introduce new techniques and models to address complex and coordinated system dynamics in a collective social context rebuilding a proper foundation geared to aiding both humans and artificial agents.
Hierarchies in Observability
When designing observability and controllability interfaces for systems of services, or any system, it is essential to consider how it connects the operator to the operational domain regarding the information content, structure, and visual forms. What representation is most effective in the immediate grounding of an operator within a situation?
Observability Scaled: Attention & Awareness
Because of limited processing resource capacities, brains focus more on some signals than others - signals compete for the brain's attention. This internal competition is partially under the bottom-up influence of a sensory stimuli model and somewhat under the top-down control of other mental states, including goals - this is very similar to how situational awareness is theorized to operate optimally.
Situational Awareness in Systems of Services
Unfortunately, many of the solutions promoted in the Observability space, such as distributed tracing, metrics, and logging, have not offered a suitable mental model in any form whatsoever. The level of situation awareness is still sorely lacking in most teams, who appear to be permanently stalled at ground zero and overtly preoccupied with data and details.
Observability is Yesteryear’s Monitoring
Looking back over 20 years of building application performance monitoring and management tooling, little has changed, though today's tooling does collect more data from far more data sources. But effectiveness and efficiency have not improved; it could be argued that both have regressed.
The Solution is not Distributed Tracing
Science and technology have made it possible to observe the motion of atoms, but humans don’t actively watch such atomical movements in their navigation of physical spaces. Our perception, attention, and cognition have evolutionary scaled to an effective model for us in most situations. Distributed tracing spans, and the data items attached, are the atoms of observability.
Observability – The Two Hemispheres
Two distinct hemispheres seem to form within the application monitoring and observability space - one dominated by measurement, data collection, and decomposition, the other by meaning, system dynamics, and (re)construction of the whole.