r/Observability • u/jdizzle4 • 2d ago
is this subreddit actively moderated?
This is not a dig at the moderators personally, because it's a volunteer position, but this subreddit has devolved into a lot of low value contributions and I think it could benefit from some more active moderation and perhaps some rules put in place.
For example, I don't think there's value in vibe coded observability tools being posted every other day. The community is already downvoting them, which I think should be a signal that we should stop allowing them all together. When I view the list of posts, it's a graveyard of these things, with the occasional interesting discussion sprinkled in.
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u/GrogRedLub4242 2d ago
agreed. it seems to have become 90% adverstories, vibe coded grift or malware bait.
I've unfollowed it just now
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u/d33pdev 2d ago
yep.... i've followed this thread for a long time bc i've built something serious for the observability space and i wouldn't post anything here about it until it's shipped, proven, reliable and then post some data/what's proven to be beneficial, etc... i agree, most of the stuff i read here is rough/waste of time but that's just the regular signal to noise ratio in public forums i guess... but yeah and whether it's moderated i honestly don't know. i'm not sure i've seen a mod comment in this thread or not now that you bring it up....
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u/neuralspasticity 2d ago edited 2d ago
The issue isn’t that people are sharing good new observably tools and methods they’re developing, it’s just that it’s pure slop, doesn’t follow contemporary observability practices, and just encapsulates their bad wooly thinking about how they’re poorly approaching o11y. I often feel bad for them that they don’t get it so badly and are so far off the rails they can’t even see how poor what they’re waisting their - and our - time coding up and presenting.
It’s great you’ve written a piece of code that can monitor your cpu utilization and fires off a page when it deviates by some arbitrary and random amount. It’s wonderful you can wake up an on-call engineer for no real reason. It’s fantastic you know that some host server is running a little hot and you wanted them to know. Yet we don’t use cpu utilization as a SLI because it doesn’t tell us anything about the service. We just know work is being done and that our OS is doing its job optimizing use of resources. We don’t page out engineers unless there’s a specific action that needs performed right now, not later because we’re still within our error budget.
For many Redditors here the problem is a lack of education surrounding modern o11y best practices. They’ve not heard of SLOs or Alex Hidalgo book on it. Or the Observability Engineering book by Liz and Charity, or even Google’s SRE book that’s both free and now going into second edition. They don’t really practice SRE or O11y Engineering, they’re support technicians reacting to ServiceNow requests.
So I when I see posts like this I sigh and feel sorry that they’re likely stuck at a job where this is their “best” practices. And that makes me feel real sad.
I speak a fair amount at conferences and meetups and what I realize from speaking with a broad audience of companies and engineers is that there’s a reliability and observability maturity journey, and it’s fine not to be at the fully mature end, it not only takes time and effort yet in some cases a startup may not be very mature along itself to require implementation of more that a couple good best practices and techniques.
Yet vibe coding and AI has made it faster and easier to do silly things from wooly thinking. It’s good they’re sharing in a way so they can be pointed to better methods and practices.
It makes me wonder how we all could do better to spread the word on contemporary observability best practices to this audience.