It is time for new direction closer aligned to goals, focused more on the dynamics of systems that humans are already highly adapted to with their social intelligence, within which situation is a crucial conceptual element of the cognitive model. Understanding and appropriately responding to different social situations is fundamental to social cognition and effective interpersonal interactions.
Author: William David Louth
Observability: Disruptions
Disruptions are one factor affecting the maintenance of service quality levels. A disruption is an interruption in the flow of (work) items through a network that can, for a while, make it inoperable or where the network flow performance is subpar. Depending on the severity of the disruption, a network may need to replan and restructure itself for a period afterward. There are two main categories of disruptions: disturbance and deviation.
Observability: Projecting Ahead
The low-level data captured in volume by observability instruments has closed our eyes to salient change. We've built a giant wall of white noise. The human mind's perception and prediction capabilities evolved to detect significant changes to our survival. Observability has no steering mechanism to guide effective and efficient measurement, modeling, and memory processes. Companies are gorging on ever-growing mounds of observability data collected that should be of secondary concern.
Priming Observability for Situations
The Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) model asserts that individuals assess the situation, generate a plausible course of action (CoA), and then evaluate it using mental simulation. The authors claim that decision-making is primed by recognizing the situation and not entirely determined by recognition. The model contradicts the common thinking that individuals employ an analytical model in complex time-critical operational contexts.
Observability: The OODA Loop
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).
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.