From vendors to vanguard: Airbnb’s hard-won lessons in observability ownership

How a complex, large-scale migration to an in-house observability platform led to superior tooling, consistent data, and a fundamental reset of the developer experience. By: Callum Jones , Rong Hu Observability — the function of providing visibility into the performance and reliability of applications using metrics, logs and traces — is one of the most important tools of the Infrastructure group at any company. Without a reliable, cost-effective, and user-friendly observability platform, you limit an organization’s ability to empower engineers to assess, support, and improve the reliability of their application. Like many of its peers, Airbnb started out by outsourcing its observability needs to vendors. But, as the company matured, our needs diverged from the typical vendor’s incentives. Vendors charge by the amount of data ingested, so Airbnb’s costs were rising, but more data does not automatically lead to faster insights or reduced mean time to detect (MTTD) or repair (MTTR). Also,