New York

October 15–17, 2025

Berlin

November 3–4, 2025

London

June 2–3, 2026

“Trial by fire” is destroying your incident response 

The worst time to learn about observability is during an outage.
November 18, 2025

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Anxiety is the enemy of learning. What does this mean for how engineers learn observability fundamentals?

For the first several years of my software career, I was painfully inefficient at troubleshooting production issues. Despite having access to software monitoring and observability platforms, I only used them when something was broken in production.

The effect was that all of my learning around observability concepts happened while I was actively troubleshooting production issues, which typically happens under the dual duress of ticking clocks and repeated update requests. Sometimes, this happened live in a war room, in front of colleagues, exposing my lack of knowledge for all to see.

Join LeadDev.com for free to access this content

Create an account to access our free engineering leadership content, free online events and to receive our weekly email newsletter. We will also keep you up to date with LeadDev events.

Register with google

We have linked your account and just need a few more details to complete your registration:

Terms and conditions

 

 

Enter your email address to reset your password.

 

A link has been emailed to you - check your inbox.



Don't have an account? Click here to register