The second edition of Observability Engineering is available for download on our website.
By: Charity Majors IT’S HERE it’s here it’s here it’s here!!!! The second edition of Observability Engineering is available for download, and since Honeycomb is the sponsor, you can now download it from our website (the dead tree version will take another month).
This is a strange time to be writing a book. We started writing in June of 2025, and most of the intervening year has been suffused with the giddiness of working with generative AI, the rocket fuel, the widening of apertures, the reckless sense of wide-open possibilities.
As we write this now, midway through 2026, it feels like the industry is shifting gears. The future does not seem quite so staggeringly open-ended as it did for a moment in time. It feels like many people are looking around and seeing the same thing: that AI is not magic, and this is still an engineering problem. It is time for us to rediscover the need for rigor and reinvent new constraints.
The process of writing and editing, rewriting and reviewing, thinking and talking and collaborating around a written artifact, is one of the oldest forms of rigor and discipline. William Zinsser, storied editor of the New Yorker, once said that “writing is thinking on paper.” And there is no better partner than O’Reilly, when it comes to developing and refining technical material.
This book has been a blessing for us. It forced us to sit down and reckon with the changes underway, and consider which first principles still apply, and how, and why—just a bit earlier than the rest of the world.
The publication could not come at a more opportune time. We (and our many brilliant guest authors) hope it will be a blessing to you, too.
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