Developer observability is a new pillar of observability adapted for the needs of developers. Unlike typical observability solutions, it’s aimed directly at developers and not at DevOps. As such, it provides a direct connection between the source code and the observable production.
A good analogy would be that developer observability is like a debugger whereas current observability tools are like a profiler. When you run with a debugger, it doesn’t do much until you add breakpoints to extract information. A profiler constantly gets information while running. Both are very useful and both serve different use cases.
Some of you might have read this article thinking about remote debugging. This has many drawbacks/problems but one shines above all. Imagine a developer in your company placing a breakpoint on the user authentication code and siphoning off user credentials.
Stack Overflow Blog: How observability is redefining the roles of developers.