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Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

jean yang is pretty much an industry legend at this point, and was hyperfocused on her specific kind of o11y (ebpf based drop-in traffic monitoring) which is an obviously important part of an overall o11y product suite that i think many players would either have to build or buy. i imagine she had her pick of acquirers.

edit: check out her interviews! crazy impressive https://www.listennotes.com/top-podcasts/jean-yang/

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o18y = "observability" to save you a click.

Thanks, I had no idea that was even a supposed abbreviation.

Companies that pioneered the stateful reconstruction of APIs from raw network events -

- Netsil [0] (acquired by Nutanix) - Academic spin-out from UPenn

- Pixie Labs [1] (acquired by New Relic)

[0]: https://thenewstack.io/netsil-visualizes-performance-microse...

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/10/new-relic-acquires-kuberne...

why do you think these companies, though successful in their own right, never became bigger standalone observability platforms?

While the tech these companies built (stateful reconstruction) is quite hard to engineer, large-scale observability platforms like Datadog were much more successful as they could cover a much larger surface area with minimal incremental effort. Even APM companies like New Relic and AppD struggled to justify the value they were delivering with their well-engineered code-level agents in the face of large-scale server/process metrics collection done by the Datadog agent.

In addition, these techniques have been prone to event misses (partial reconstruction) in case the ring buffer overflows and are ineffective in the face of SSL traffic.

concise summary. thank you! i guess simple is best.

hate to be a prick but is there a difference between o11y and observability? or is the word observability just too long to type out

Yup - same idea as a11y - just easier to type. :-)

and less accessible !

yea i feel justified typing o11y but the idea of accessibility advocates using a11y is very ironic haha

I've actually seen more of her name than Akita itself. In a way, that's great marketing.

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