Sherlock Holmes, Observability and Chaos Engineering - Fun Story

"Without observability, you don’t have ‘chaos engineering’. You just have chaos.” Charity Majors

I have always been?very intrigued by Sherlock?Holmes' "school of thought" and read?many of them. There are two stories, that kind of stand out when I think about modelling his thought process, called Abductive reasoning in the context of observability and principles?of chaos engineering.

Sounds amusing, but when you think deeply ("slowly") about the "Adventure of the silver blaze" it's kind of takes us to realm of "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns'',??

"Known knowns" are things we know that we know, in the context of distributed systems, these are the?things we understand fully and can predict how they will behave.

"Known unknowns" are things we know that we don't know, these might be edge cases or untested code that we know exist but have never fully explored.

"Unknown unknowns" are the?stuff we don't know that we don't know. These are the hidden time bombs , because they represent potential failure points we are not even aware of.

Coming back to Sherlock Holmes' silver blaze story and "The curious incident of the dog in the nighttime"??the dog that didn't bark, is an example of an "unknown unknown" shifting to "known known." The dog not barking was a piece of the puzzle that cops were not paying attention to, is an unknown unknown?but Sherlock's thought process in recognising the criticality of this non-event, turned this into a "known known".?

In the context of chaos engineering, this translates to the need of observability and abductive logic to unpack as many of the "unknown unknowns" as possible.

Chaos engineering is perhaps all?about discovering?"unknown unknowns" before they pose a threat.?

Another?one is “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” where Julia died and her last words were “speckled band.”?Her?sister fears she might be next. Sherlock investigates (Observes) the case, forms a hypothesis, and controls blast radius ( dude carried a cane) and tests it by recreating the conditions, I think it's conceptually aligns with the "Principles of Chaos"

One thing though, he got the snake wrong, it was not an Indian?Swamp Adder :)

-??My opinions are my own.