🕵️ for changes to enhance observability

[sylvanaar]

Hello @carloscuesta 😎!

• Emoji: 🕵️
• Code: :detective:
• Description:

This generalizes the Health Check (#668) proposal to mean any code that enhances the observability of the code. This includes instrumentation for debugging or adding metric sources, logs(covered?), and tracers.

Anything that helps you to find problems, and explores their root cause - but is not the main purpose of the rest of the application.

I liked the magnifier, and I pointed it to the right - but it is the same emoji as SEO. So I found this one.

[vhoyer]

Personally I prefer the generic approach, but the description is kinda... lacking? Could you propose a better name for it?

[sylvanaar]

@vhoyer - the best name is observability - but that may not be a term everyone knows.

Description: "Improve observability", in line with "Improve accessibility"

Here is some background on observability

Here's an excerpt:

observability is how you explain unknown-unknowns, that it’s about exploration and debugging instead of dashboards and pattern matching or accessing certain data type

[vhoyer]

Donno, @carloscuesta @johannchopin , any thoughts?

[johannchopin]

I like it since it can cover the analytic Gitmoji 📈 and also cover all other runtime debugging tool like sentry for example 👍

[vhoyer]

Does this really cover analytics?

[carloscuesta]

I don't see the use cases clear for this emoji, could you provide some examples?

[sylvanaar]

Hi @vhoyer, yes, it covers the collection of analytics.

@carloscuesta - this covers:

• Logs, metrics, distributed tracing, debugging tools of any kind that help expose internal state, the list goes on.
• What if I add a REPL to my app to interact with it (like a browser console). That is an observability enhancement.
• If I am adding logging - that is an observability enhancement typically.
• If I add code to measure counts and durations of requests - that is observability.
• If I integrate with a tool to see what my app does - like Reactotron that is observability.
• Of course, integrating with a solution that captures information about your application at runtime - is why analytics are covered.

Observability is your UI for servicing/operating your application.

The emoji itself might be worth resisting - I want it to express "seeing inside" something.

As a more generic concept, it is a superset that contains 🔊 (🔇?) 🥅 (if they are exposed) 📈

So quite a lot of this concept is not yet covered.

[vhoyer]

You know what? I like it. Tho it could be hard to covey this idea merely by "observability" 🤔 albeit I have no better suggestion...

[connorjs]

Was just scrolling through the issues. +1 to the generic nature. Does "enhance insight" offer an alternative term? (From the thread, it seemed the term "observability" gave some pause, and I immediately thought "insight" when reading through.)

[meg-gutshall]

@sylvanaar, if you want to hold out for a different emoji, X-Ray is a candidate for Unicode 14.0. It'll be a bit of a wait though.

[vhoyer]

how about "improve code inspection"? @carloscuesta @johannchopin

[johannchopin]

@vhoyer Yep I would agree on that 👌

[carloscuesta]

Hey!

The problem is see with this proposal is that we already have:

Logs:

• 🔊Add logs
• 🔇 Remove logs

Healthchecks:

• 🩺

This one feels like grouping all of them into a bigger category, does it makes sense to add an emoji that covers all of the use-cases while maintaining those 3? 🤔

[vhoyer]

well, a lot of things are a grouping of the ✨ and 🐛 already, right? (in fact, it would be cool to see a visualization of this categories ahah)

[connorjs]

FWIW, since my original comment, I have seen and heard more references to the term observability. To provide another industry reference, I found a Google dev ops article on observability (and monitoring).

Some more thoughts about choosing the gitmoji for commits following some recent work I have done. Overall, happy enough with the landscape, but feel that we could improve wording around this area. Plus, holding out for xray could have benefits (I find not using person emojis better).

1. 🔊 and 🔇 explicitly say logs. To me, this excludes metrics, because I have always explicitly used the terms metrics and logs separately. However,
   1. I wonder if others do not view the same exclusion.
   2. If others do, or maybe just for search optimization, we could extend the definitions to include logs and metrics or logs and monitors or some other variation
2. After scrolling through all gitmojis twice (minus speaker ones, above), I settled on 🩺 for health check. However,
   1. I noticed it says add or update. Any historical commentary on no remove here? (Guessing just historical and speakers were older items in “spec”)
   2. This worked for my tasks (adding performance or status related metrics), but unsure if it applies to A/B testing metrics. (But maybe 📈, analytics or track code covers this?)

[carloscuesta]

Hey! Sounds good to me let's add this one 🙏🏼

[connorjs]

Nice! Let me re-ask one of my questions hidden in my musings 😅

Do the speaker/sound gitmojis (🔊 and 🔇) refer explicitly to logs (and not metrics)? Or - no - they can also include metrics.

[carloscuesta]

I would say speaker/sound gitmojis only refer to logs!

[connorjs]

Thanks for clarifying!

@sylvanaar - Do you have any new thoughts to add here? And thoughts on holding out for XRay emoji?

(I really like using XRay as @meg-gutshall mentioned. And we should hopefully see it coming soon.)

[julealgon]

Not a big fan of introducing something that becomes a higher category for existing categories. The fact that this would cover both logs and metrics/tracing, which I already use the existing icons for, would just cause ambiguity IMHO.

If there is some area of observability that is not covered today, I'd rather a specific icon be introduced for that instead of creating an "umbrella" icon that makes existing ones "obsolete".

[connorjs]

@jlandure - which emojis/icons do you use for metrics and/or tracing? My main interest was finding the best one for metrics, but tracing definitely relates.

[connorjs]

Regarding "observability as a higher category" - I am considering including an "observability" tag in #924 if we think observability does represent a higher grouping of existing emojis, and we would prefer a new, specific emoji.

Tentatively, I have this list.

• 📈 Add or update analytics or track code.
• 🔊 Add or update logs.
• 🔇 Remove logs.
• 🩺 Add or update healthcheck. (maybe)
• 🔧 Add or update configuration files.
• ⚗️ Perform experiments. (maybe)

Thus, I think “metrics” is still missing, and I think we should have a dedicated emoji for it instead of trying to bind it to one of the existing ones. I will think about some emoji choices...

(Note: I prefer not to use people emojis because of skin color configuration. For example, I use rocket to insert my emojis, so using detective inserts as 🕵🏻‍♂️ by default for me. Related article I think this one).

---

Note: I originally included 🧐 Data exploration/inspection, but after reading #615, I think it no longer applies.

[connorjs]

Oh, and on the subject of tracing.

Does 📈 (Add or update analytics or track code) represent tracing? See #36 for original issue.

If not, I think we hold out for 🩻(x-ray) support. (Slack uses :x-ray: and Discord uses :x_ray:, so we would wait for GitHub/GitLab support.)

[connorjs]

My candidates for “Add, update, or remove metrics,” sorted alphabetically by short code.

Emoji	Short code	Reason	Link
🔢	:1234:	Metrics are numeric (in value)	Emojipedia
🧮	:abacus:	Counts are common metrics; emoji can be used for numbers in general	Emojipedia
📊	:bar_chart:	Metrics are charted/plotted/graphed, and 📈 already taken	Emojipedia
⏱️	:stopwatch:	Timing is a very common metric	Emojipedia
📏	:straight_ruler:	Ruler for measuring	Emojipedia
📐	:triangular_ruler:	The other ruler, but “more engineering-y.”	Emojipedia

[vhoyer]

ok, so, what is the definition of "tracing" and "metrics" we are working here? (because I always used 🔇 and 🔊 for "tracing" and 📈 for "metrics")