Why Enterprises must embrace observability
Observability Vs Monitoring
Usually, in a system, we consistently sense the output and based on the changes, we anticipate the result to be a problem or an error or at times, the output itself might be an error which in case, stays to be too ironic. This practice is all about monitoring.
Observability is the superset of monitoring. Here, in terms of observability, we monitor the internal activities of the system, and each and every instance relevant to the need is captured. This results in foreseeing the incidents that are about to happen thus, such incidents can be avoided proactively as we sense a disturbance in the system early before the incident could happen.
Production updates were few and planned throughout the age of data centres and monolithic programmes. Dependencies were simple to understand, and the overall health of the programme could be evaluated by tracking the deviation of a few well-known metrics: known unknowns.
With the distributed modern applications, the data is also distributed, and this includes all the logs, metrics and traces as well. This demands a high investigation time on your data, resulting in a higher mean time to resolution (MTTR)
An observability solution may help you extract even more information from your monitoring data, allowing you to view not just the internal condition of your systems but also reveal unknown unknowns: things that may be going wrong that you weren’t even aware of.
Logs, metrics, and traces are all various types of telemetry data. However, a good observability solution will place them in context and assist you in acting on the data. To get the most out of an observability platform, it should offer intuitive data visualisation and navigation: purpose-built interfaces that make it simple and flexible to engage with your data, as well as tools that enable you to filter and discover logs for a particular application on a specific day. To put it another way, the ability to swiftly create custom metric aggregations without needing to be a data scientist — since when a performance problem arises, you need to investigate and rectify it right away.
Overall, every decision-maker should use observability solutions to be able to prevent incidence in advance. The elastic solutions are capable of providing the appropriate service based on the system’s capabilities and requirements. Squareshift, as a services business, also provides observability services as an elastic service partner.
Credits
This blog has been co-authored with Prabhu, Akshaya, Elango and Arvind Venkatesh from the SquareShift team
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