Observability in digital transformation

Digital transformation is inevitable in modern-day organizations. Digital business initiatives remain the highest priority for business leaders, as operational efficiency is critical for their success.

Enterprises are ditching their legacy systems and technologies and embarking on the digital transformation journey. Technologies like the cloud help businesses modernize their systems and achieve greater efficiency. However, managing cloud computing and huge volumes of data can be complex. An organization must have a clear view of this complexity and find ways to tackle them.

Observability is the answer to these complexities. But what is observability? What’s the role of observability in digital transformation?

What is observability?

In a general scenario, observability is the ability to the internal conditioning of complex systems according to the understanding of their external outputs. Observability is how you interpret applications or infrastructure, enabling you to find and fix the root causes of issues. The more observable a system is, the faster you recognize and resolve bugs with fewer complications or code. We can also refer to observability as the practice and use of tools to analyze, correlate and aggregate a steady stream of output data of an application, along with its hardware and the network, to scrutinize, troubleshoot, and debug them

Observability is a naturalistic evolution of data collection methods like Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Network Performance Management (NPM). Observability addresses the increasingly instantaneous, dispersed, and dynamic nature of modern-day cloud applications with lesser effort but maximum effectiveness. Observability provides improved monitoring, APM, and NPM.

In the traditional monitoring approach, the company doesn’t have direct control over multiple cloud environments or managed services. Instead, they depend on the reports from cloud providers. Even though the cloud provider takes responsibility for the application’s performance, the organization has little to no idea about the underlying technology or the performance statistics. Without observability, enterprises face the risk of the application’s failure and ruining the customer experience. While traditional monitoring solutions struggle to keep up with the rising volume of data, observability is the key to handling such challenging scenarios.

What’s the difference between monitoring and observability?

Monitoring and observability are concepts that are supplementary yet different. Let’s check the facts about observability vs monitoring.

Monitoring collects and analyzes data from the application, system, or networks. Meanwhile, observability uses data to give the organization contextual knowledge to determine and react to issues that teams are unaware of. Monitoring is a procedure where the organization collects and analyzes predefined data from separate systems, while observability accumulates all information that IT systems generate.

Monitoring and observability offer a complete view of the IT system’s condition. While monitoring notifies the organization of possible problems, observability helps the business identify and fix the root cause. In short, observability is an upgrade to the traditional monitoring approaches.

The pillars of observability

Observability systems uncover and accumulate application performance and telemetry data continuously by integrating them with existing infrastructure components and providing tools to add instrumentation to those components. Observability focuses on three pillars – logs, metrics, and traces.

Logs

Logs are granular, complete, and unchangeable records of events occurring on a particular application. Logs can come in three formats – plain text, structured data, or binary. They document every event with high fidelity and a short time frame. When an issue happens in the system or when developers look to troubleshoot the application, they go for the event logs.

Metrics

Metrics, also known as time-series metrics, are the fundamental measurement of the performance of a service or component over a time period. For example, the observability tool of a system gathers metrics of the CPU capacity an application uses and the latency experiences during a usage spike or HTTP requests per second.

Traces

Traces are the representative profiles of entire end-to-end records of every user request across a distributed system. The trace links events together to create a complete visual of the flow of the transaction. For example, a trace shows how applications compete for storage or network resources.

Observability tools

There are a number of tools that organizations use to perform observability functions. However, picking the clear favorite is a herculean task, as each observability tool varies according to an organization’s goals. Here are the leading observability tools.

• Datadog
• Grafana
• Dynatrace
• Lightstep
• AppDynamics
• New Relic
• Splunk

Observability aligns businesses with digital transformation

The tech world came up with new-age operational models like BizDevOps, DevSecOps, and others, signaling the significance of aligning businesses with technology to accelerate innovation, data collection, and security. However, organizations often struggle to manage high-volume data and the increasing complexity of technologies. Observability acts as the bridge between the application team and users by eliminating complexities and offering visibility.

Unreliable cloud services or poor incident resolution leads to low customer experience and retention. The application team runs observability tools to find the root cause of issues and fix them. The secret to great observability is gathering data in a centralized data storage facility and making them accessible on demand. Teams can build custom dashboards and analytics about the systems. Organizations can understand more about the application behavior with ease.

Observability helps organizations streamline their operations with efficiency.

Benefits of observability for digital transformation

With observability comes various benefits, creating a system that’s easy to understand, monitor, upgrade, and repair. Observability supports agile, DevOps, and SRE goals to rapidly deliver software of higher quality.

Find and fix the unknown

Monitoring systems face the limitations of identifying only certain conditions that you expect. Observability discovers issues you might not know, tracks them back to the performance issues, and provide context to identify and solve the root causes. With a centralized visualization dashboard, users can get insights and make informed decisions.

Resolve issues early

Observability introduces and infuses monitoring into the early stages of the software development process, empowering DevOps teams to determine and fix issues early. Observability helps tech teams improve issues in the codes early in the application development lifecycle, resulting in better user experience or SLAs.

Self-healing application infrastructure

Powered by machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and automation capabilities, observability analyzes system outputs to predict bugs and resolve them with no manual intervention. The self-healing or automated remediation capabilities reduce downtimes, outages, or failures. DevOps teams save time and drive overall efficiency.

Enriching end-user experience with observability

Observability faces the trick of apprehending the observability issue. As the competition for the best products and services tightens, businesses look to provide their clients with outstanding experiences.

Digital transformation and data observability go hand-in-hand in gathering and analyzing every aspect of the application and its infrastructure, including its efficiency, connectivity, and integrity. The observability data powers DevOps teams to attain insights and comprehend the dependability of the activities inside their specific business atmosphere. The insights and analytics come in handy to fix issues and improve the user experience.

Conclusion

With organizations adopting modern technologies rapidly, observability in digital transformation is the key to success. The future of observability is bright. Want to know more about observability? Let’s discuss taking a step further.