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👁️‍🗨️ MER

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MERs summarize engineering work, challenges, and future plans, emphasizing observability data to improve system understanding and performance.

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Regular reviews, enhanced by observability, help maintain alignment, identify potential issues early, and drive data-informed decisions.

MERs provide a regular overview of engineering accomplishments, roadblocks, and plans for the next month, with a focus on observability insights.

A Monthly Engineering Review (👁️‍🗨️ MER) is a recurring meeting or report that summarizes the engineering team’s activities, progress, and challenges over the past month. Crucially, in an 🦉 Observability-focused MER, data from monitoring, logging, and tracing systems is used to provide deeper insights into system behavior and performance.

MERs are crucial for keeping stakeholders informed about the engineering team’s work. They provide a structured way to track progress against goals, discuss technical challenges, and plan for upcoming projects.

MERs can take various forms, from formal presentations to written reports, depending on the organization’s size and structure. The key is to provide a clear and concise overview of the team’s activities, enriched with observability data.

TakeAways

  • 📌 MERs are essential for communication, tracking progress, and understanding system health.
    • They summarize the past month’s work, including key observability metrics.
    • They identify challenges and plan for the future, using data to inform decisions.
  • 💡 MERs should be concise, informative, action-oriented, and data-driven, leveraging observability insights.
  • 🔍 MERs often include 📊 Metrics like completed tasks, bug counts, project milestones, and crucial observability data such as:
    • Error rates
    • Latency
    • Throughput
    • Resource utilization (CPU, memory, etc.)
    • Key performance indicators (KPIs) derived from logs and traces.

Process

  1. 🗓️ Schedule the MER meeting or set a deadline for the report.
  2. ⚙️ Gather data on the engineering team’s activities and progress, including observability data from monitoring tools.
  3. 🛠️ Prepare a presentation or report summarizing the key information, highlighting observability trends and insights.
  4. 🗣️ Present the MER to stakeholders or distribute the report, emphasizing data-driven conclusions and action items.
  5. 👥 Discuss any issues or action items arising from the review, focusing on how observability can help address them.

Thoughts

  • 📈 Progress Tracking: MERs, using observability data, help track progress toward project goals and system health.
  • 🚧 Problem Identification: They provide a data-driven forum for discussing and addressing challenges, using observability to pinpoint root causes.
  • 💡 Communication: They facilitate data-informed communication between engineering and other stakeholders, providing concrete evidence of system behavior.
  • 🤔 Continuous Improvement: MERs can identify areas for process improvement based on observability insights, leading to better system performance and reliability.
  • 🔎 Observability Focus: Integrating observability data allows for deeper understanding of system performance, enabling proactive issue detection and resolution.
  • 👁️‍🗨️ Data-Driven Decisions: MERs provide data to make informed decisions about resource allocation, system improvements, and future development.

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