Novice observability practitioners are often overly obsessed with performance. They might approach instrumentation with skepticism and have concerns about latency degradation or resource consumption.
The attached article is a primer on the topic of instrumentation overhead, and it will teach you how to think about overhead in an observability context. In it, we cover the causes of overhead, why overhead is so hard to measure, and why it's even harder to reliably predict. Lastly, we will present some practical techniques for understanding overhead in your environment and some strategies for coping with it.
Due to length limitations in the blogging platform, this topic is presented as a PDF white paper (attached).
