What is it?
Observability is the ability to measure the state of a system.
To do this, you must collect, visualise, and apply intelligence to all metrics, events, traces, and logs generated by the system itself. In other words, Observability is how well a system can be understood based on its own operation.
Technically, this concept originated in 1960, included in Rudolf E. Kalman’s control theory, although it was not until 2013 that it began to popularise in the context of computing, IT systems, mainly driven by Twitter engineers. In this way, Observability in IT encompasses the entire ecosystem: infrastructure, software, communications…
Observability has gained importance in recent years, as cloud-native environments have become more complex, developments more agile, and identifying possible “root causes” of a failure or anomaly has become more difficult.
Furthermore, as teams collect and work with Observability data, they also realise its benefits not only for IT but also for the business.
The importance of Observability
With the rise of cloud-native environments, the emergence of micro-services, DevOps teams, continuous delivery, and agile development, everything has accelerated and become more complex, making it increasingly difficult to identify issues. Is the server’s performance deteriorating? Is it the Cloud provider? Has new code been deployed that is affecting users?
Observability helps cross-functional teams understand what is happening in highly distributed systems. It allows them to understand what is slow or not working and what can be done to improve performance. With an Observability solution, teams can receive alerts about future problems and proactively address them before they manifest and affect users, as well as receive an analysis of the possible root cause to streamline their service recovery efforts.
Since modern Cloud environments are dynamic and constantly changing in scale and complexity, most issues are neither known nor monitored. Observability addresses this problem of “unknown unknowns” by continuously and automatically understanding new types of problems as they arise.
Furthermore, the value of Observability is not limited to the technical realm. Once Observability data is collected and analysed, there is a window of information on the behaviour of different SLAs. This visibility allows for validation that software deployments meet business objectives, reviewing user experience SLO results, and prioritising business decisions based on what matters most.
Differences between Monitoring and Observability
Although both are related (and complement each other!), Monitoring and Observability are two distinct concepts.
In a Monitoring scenario, dashboards and alerts are typically preconfigured to alert of expected problems that have already occurred in the past. However, they are based on the assumption that the type of problems that will occur can be predicted.
Cloud-native environments do not lend themselves to this type of Monitoring, as they are dynamic and complex; it is not always possible to know in advance what problems may arise.
Conventional Monitoring, as outlined in the ITIL methodology framework, is not as helpful in the world of micro-services and distributed systems. Observability, on the other hand, has the power to not only know that something is wrong and could cause a problem but also to understand why; it provides the flexibility to identify patterns and failures that had not even been considered, the “unknown unknowns.”
In an Observability scenario, where an environment has been fully integrated into the platform, one can flexibly explore what is happening and quickly determine the root cause of unforeseen problems.
The pillars of Observability
Traditionally, it has been established that Observability has three fundamental pillars: logs, metrics, and distributed traces. However, all that “telemetry” is focused on the back-end of systems and applications and does not provide a full picture.
It is necessary to also observe the front-end in order to determine the real performance of applications and infrastructure for end users. Therefore, the focus of the three pillars is extended by adding user experience data to eliminate blind spots:
- Logs: records of events that occurred at a specific time.
- Metrics: values represented as counts or measurements that are often calculated or aggregated over a period of time.
- Distributed traces: show the activity of a transaction or request as it flows through applications, demonstrating how services are connected.
- User experience: the perspective of an end user on a specific digital experience within an application.
Observability, SRE, and DevOps
We have already explored in a previous article what SRE is, but… how does it interact with Observability?
SRE teams, as well as DevOps teams, are responsible for understanding their production systems and managing their complexity. Therefore, it is natural for them to also be involved in the Observability of the systems they develop and operate.
As DevOps and SRE practices continue to evolve, and as platform engineering grows, inevitably more innovative engineering practices will emerge. But all these innovations will depend on having Observability as a central point to understand increasingly complex systems.
Mature SRE and DevOps teams want to measure any visible symptoms of potential user impact and then delve deeper into understanding those symptoms using Observability
Kiteris’ Observability
At Kiteris, we are committed to service quality. That is why we rely on the most cutting edge tools in the market, all of which are included in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for APM (Application Performance Monitoring) and Observability.
We offer various services, from migrating a basic or limited platform such as Splunk or OpenSearch, to setting up more advanced platforms from scratch: from well-established and powerful ones like Dynatrace, Datadog, or New Relic, to “Freemium” solutions like Grafana or ManageEngine Site24x7 for less demanding scenarios, our catalog is extensive and comprehensive, designed to meet any need.
Check out our latest success story: Transformation of an IT monitoring system.
