What is observability and who uses it?
Relying on a deep understanding of communications between applications and microservices, it enables engineers and administrators to immediately find faults and slowdowns without the high-cost, labor-intensive war rooms that plague large organizations. The speed you gain is especially helpful when complex applications span public clouds, owned data centers, and third-party processors — making it harder to identify the root cause of service degradations.
Observability tools enable IT teams to quickly detect, diagnose, and resolve issues that impact performance and availability by tracking metrics, events, logs, and traces, known as MELT indicators.
A metric is a measurement of key application processes, such as how long it takes to respond to a request for data. Metrics can establish the threshold for acceptable performance for certain transactions and processes and track the time it takes to perform them.
An event is an occurrence within a system at a specific point in time during a specific measurement period. An event can be a user login, an alert, or an HTTP interaction. Because they may include a timestamp and metadata, events can provide valuable context for metrics.
A log is the record an application keeps of different events, such as when configurations were updated or when CPU usage was very high. Excessive CPU utilization usually indicates that more compute power is needed or that an application is running inefficiently.
A trace visually represents the connections between the microservices that are involved in the execution of an application. Because a trace reflects the time it takes to perform a given process, the trace’s visual time gap grows when the application is slow to respond to the user.
Because of their complexity and lack of correlation with MELT data, most current observability tools can only be used by skilled, experienced developers and SREs. Developers use the tools to understand how the applications they have written are operating and whether they need to remove performance bottlenecks that are impeding responsiveness.
SREs are responsible for infrastructure operations and automating operations tasks. Consequently, they need to understand which processes are working well and which are not. SREs must be able to quickly pinpoint the cause of any performance slowdowns so that developers can make the necessary corrections.
However, responding to apparent incidents and suspected glitches can distract these two types of workers from higher-level tasks. Enabling a broader population to use observability tools would help to identify and resolve more issues faster. These could be IT and cloud operations teams, system administrators, or application administrators.
In the Foundry MarketPulse survey, which included 100 IT decision-makers at large enterprises in the US and UK, 64% of respondents said that extending access to such workers would greatly improve incident resolution accuracy.
The benefits of this approach would go beyond increasing application performance and reducing downtime. With developers and SREs focused on their primary goals of coding new features and automating infrastructure operations, applications would be delivered faster and would operate more smoothly. The result: increased customer satisfaction and greater organizational competitiveness.
