#63 - Does "Big Observability" Neglect Mobile?

Andrew Tunall is a product engineering leader focused on pushing the boundaries of reliability with a current focus on mobile observability. Using his experience from AWS and New Relic, he’s vocal about the need for a more user-focused observability, especially in mobile, where traditional practices fall short.

1. Career Journey and Current Role: Andrew Tunall, now at Embrace, a mobile observability startup in Portland, Oregon, started his journey at AWS before moving to New Relic. He shifted to a smaller, Series B company to learn beyond what corporate America offered.

2. Specialization in Mobile Observability: At Embrace, Andrew and his colleagues build tools for consumer mobile apps, helping engineers, SREs, and DevOps teams integrate observability directly into their workflows.

3. Gap in Mobile Observability: Observability for mobile apps is still developing, with early tools like Crashlytics only covering basic crash reporting. Andrew highlights that more nuanced data on app performance, crucial to user experience, is often missed.

4. Motivation for User-Centric Tools: Leaving “big observability” to focus on mobile, Andrew prioritizes tools that directly enhance user experience rather than backend metrics, aiming to be closer to end-users.

5. Mobile's Role as a Brand Touchpoint: He emphasizes that for many brands, the primary consumer interaction happens on mobile. Observability needs to account for this by focusing on user experience in the app, not just backend performance.

6. Challenges in Measuring Mobile Reliability: Traditional observability emphasizes backend uptime, but Andrew sees a gap in capturing issues that affect user experience on mobile, underscoring the need for end-to-end observability.

7. Observability Over-Focused on Backend Systems: Andrew points out that “big observability” has largely catered to backend engineers due to the immense complexity of backend systems with microservices and Kubernetes. Despite mobile being a primary interface for apps like Facebook and Instagram, observability tools for mobile lag behind backend-focused solutions.

8. Lack of Mobile Engineering Leadership in Observability: Reflecting on a former Meta product manager’s observations, Andrew highlights the lack of VPs from mobile backgrounds, which has left a gap in observability practices for mobile-specific challenges. This gap stems partly from frontend engineers often seeing themselves as creators rather than operators, unlike backend teams.

9. OpenTelemetry’s Limitations in Mobile: While OpenTelemetry provides basic instrumentation, it falls short in mobile due to limited SDK support for languages like Kotlin and frameworks like Unity, React Native, and Flutter. Andrew emphasizes the challenges of adapting OpenTelemetry to mobile, where app-specific factors like memory consumption don’t align with traditional time-based observability.

10. SREs as Connective Tissue: Andrew views Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) as essential in bridging backend observability practices with frontend user experience needs. Whether through service level objectives (SLOs) or similar metrics, SREs help ensure that backend metrics translate into positive end-user experiences—a critical factor in retaining app users.

11. Amazon’s Operational Readiness Review: Drawing from his experience at AWS, Andrew values Amazon’s practice of operational readiness reviews before launching new services. These reviews encourage teams to anticipate possible failures or user experience issues, weighing risks carefully to maintain reliability while allowing innovation.

12. Shifting Focus to “Answerability” in Observability: For Andrew, the goal of observability should evolve toward “answerability,” where systems provide engineers with actionable answers rather than mere data. He envisions a future where automation or AI could handle repetitive tasks, allowing engineers to focus on enhancing user experiences instead of troubleshooting.