Observability: Beyond Monitoring & Real-Time Problem-Solving on AWS
What is Observability? It is the process of analyzing and understanding what is happening internal state of a complex system.
Observability describes how to analyze and understand what is happening internal state of a complex system based on instrumenting it to collect metrics, logs, or traces.
Pillars of Observability
- Logging: Logs provide complete insight into files record events, warnings and errors as they occur within a software environment. Most logs include when the problem occurred and which events correlate with it, such as the time an event occurred, and which user or endpoint was associated with it.
- Metrics: Metrics are quantifiable measurement KPIs that produce alerts related to the health and performance of applications or infrastructure in terms of response time, load and latency.
- Tracing: Trace provides visualization of the complete flow of the application which is a set of related events across multiple components. The trace records how long it takes each application component to process the request and pass the result to the next component. Traces can also help to find out the root cause of the latency and error.
Observability vs Monitoring
Monitoring is capturing and displaying data. Monitoring is based on gathering predefined sets of metrics or logs. Observability is tooling or a technical solution that allows teams to actively debug their system by analyzing its inputs and outputs.
Services Offered in AWS
Amazon CloudWatch: CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, providing you with data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, and optimize resource utilization.
AWS X-Ray: Perform distributed tracing across multiple applications and systems to help find latency in a system and target it for improvement.
Amazon CodeGuru Profiler: Spot the most CPU-intensive code paths in an application using flame graphs, and optimize your code to improve performance and reduce infrastructure costs.
Amazon DevOps Guru: Automatically ingests operational data from your AWS applications and applies machine learning models informed by years of Amazon.com and AWS operational excellence to identify anomalous application behavior and surface critical issues before they cause outages or service disruptions.
AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry: OpenTelemetry provides open-source APIs, libraries, and agents to collect distributed traces and metrics for application monitoring. With AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry, you can collect metadata from your AWS resources and managed services to correlate application performance data with underlying infrastructure data, reducing the mean time to problem resolution.
Benefits of Observability
- Monitors the performance of different components of applications.
- Resolves critical problems and enhances productivity.
- Better customer experience.
- Reduces overall costs.
- Improves and optimizes operations.
Observability Challenges
- Challenges with Monitoring the overall process.
- Data Silos
- Data Volume & Speed
- Multi-Cloud Environment Integration
- Longer time troubleshooting
Best Practices for Observability
- Understand your environment.
- Automate tasks through various tools.
- Don’t prefer to monitor everything
- Select relevant and required tools.
- Review and analysis of gathered data.
References:
Distributed Tracing — AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry — Amazon Web Services
Monitoring and Observability | AWS Management & Governance (archive.org)
Observability vs. monitoring: What’s the difference? (dynatrace.com)
Why Distributed Tracing is Essential for APM | New Relic
The 3 pillars of observability: Logs, metrics and traces | TechTarget
