Observability and DevOps

Observability provides insights into your IT environments by continuously collecting performance and telemetry data. Unlike monitoring tools that only track known unknowns, observability allows you to discover conditions you might never think to look out for and provides full context so root causes and resolution timeframes can be quickly identified and resolved.

AIOps

Organizations need to regularly evaluate the internal state of applications to keep operations running smoothly, which requires being able to assess metrics, events, logs, and traces as sources for evaluation. More comprehensive data sources allow companies to identify causes for issues while finding possible resolutions quickly - this type of observability is known as full-stack observability.

Modern IT environments generate vast volumes of raw observability data that must be processed and analyzed to detect significant issues. AIOps tools are designed to assist enterprises in managing this deluge of raw data and turn it into actionable insights that guide decision-making. They accomplish this through machine learning-powered analysis of vast pools of monitoring data to spot patterns, detect anomalies, flag alerts for only important incidents, surface root cause analysis results as warnings routed directly to IT teams for remediation, as well as automating system responses based on results generated by machine learning analysis.

There are numerous AIOps solutions on the market today, yet key differences exist among them. Some specialize in monitoring or logging; others support multiple areas, such as monitoring, observability, cloud, infrastructure, etc. These AIOps solutions sometimes contain machine learning models for providing insight into complex issues, while others require third-party models to function optimally.

AIOps tools designed to optimize operations can discover the contextual topology of applications and services, using this knowledge to drive correlations and root cause inferences. They may also integrate data from sources like CMDB or IT asset management systems into periodic feeds to seed context. Finally, AIOps solutions may integrate with observability solutions to gather more data for correlation and root cause inference.

Telemetry

Network Telemetry Systems gather data about a network's components and pass it along for further analysis by other systems. Telemetry serves as the cornerstone of observability by collecting, standardizing, and prioritizing data so DevOps teams can quickly detect any issues and take the necessary measures to fix them quickly.

Logs, metrics, and distributed traces form the core components of observability. Logs are plain text records of events with timestamps and payloads that provide context; metrics measure metrics over time, while traces provide detailed transaction information from individual transactions within an environment. Successful observability requires collecting all three forms of data simultaneously; however, this can be challenging in cloud environments with enormous volumes of information and various tools for collection.

To address these challenges, observability pipelines centralize the collection of logs, metrics, and traces from multiple applications and services into a central repository for processing. They then tailor this data for specific downstream use cases while reducing management costs associated with vast amounts of unstructured information. They do this through sampling, throttling, filtering, parsing, and forwarding only relevant information to downstream tools.

Observability pipelines enable engineers to customize PII data to comply with compliance regulations before it reaches SIEM and audit platforms, thus decreasing manual data transfer times between tools while freeing engineering resources to focus on innovation.

As a result of these innovations, observable architectures can now be deployed faster and more efficiently than their traditional counterparts, enabling companies to realize true digital transformation, confidently scale applications, and attract top talent more easily. To realize these benefits, organizations must lay a solid foundation of observability and modernize existing monitoring tools beyond mere alert noise toward actionable insights.

Logs

Software development observability refers to the ability of an application's behavior and performance to be understood from data collected on it - such as logs, metrics, and traces (telemetry). Achieve observability by employing tools that capture this information efficiently while offering insight.

Traditional monitoring tools struggle to collect and analyze a steady data stream from modern distributed systems. They are also tricky to use, making it challenging for IT teams to quickly identify issues and understand their source.

Luckily, new observability platforms are now available that can assist. These solutions aggregate telemetry from all sources--logs, metrics, and traces--into one centralized view of application health. In addition to providing this comprehensive view, they also ascertain structure and dependencies among digital services before feeding that rich data to machine learning algorithms to gain additional insights.

These solutions are tailored to scale automatically, making IT teams' monitoring, and detecting issues more straightforward than ever. Furthermore, they provide visual representations and filters that filter data to reduce unimportant information and alert fatigue; moreover, they allow engineers to quickly pinpoint root-cause analysis without manually reviewing all of it themselves.

Utilizing these solutions can enable DevOps and SREs to focus more on creating apps and deploying infrastructure and less on monitoring and troubleshooting. They may also reduce MTTR while improving customer satisfaction by quickly identifying and routing issues to the appropriate team, freeing up IT resources to invest in innovation that fuels business growth.

Traces

Observability tools in distributed cloud environments enable teams to diagnose and solve complex problems more quickly. By collecting vast amounts of data from all layers, these tools provide insights into how each component interacts - helping teams promptly pinpoint root cause issues that require resolution - thus decreasing MTTR and permitting more frequent code deployments.

Modern observability platforms are tailored to handle the enormous volumes of telemetry data generated by microservices and serverless apps since traditional log aggregation becomes prohibitively expensive; time series metrics show symptoms without their causes due to cardinality restrictions, while tracking every transaction introduces application overhead as well as costs related to centralization and storage of this information.

The solution to this challenge lies within distributed tracing architectures. Traces provide a complete picture of request flows and allow SREs to see how parts of an application come together, helping them understand how changes affect performance and identify ways of improving its architecture.

Distributed tracing solutions provide visibility by associating each transaction with a unique identifier that follows it as it propagates through microservices, containers, and the host infrastructure. This gives real-time visibility into end-user experience from application layers down to infrastructure components and provides the context required for root cause analysis of complex issues.

Understanding the complexity of a system requires high-quality data, which observability solutions provide. They identify digital service structures and dependencies, filter out unimportant information to avoid alert fatigue, and offer complete contextual data needed for root-cause analysis - helping teams to rapidly identify and address issues faster while improving product quality and customer experience.

Analytics

Observability can be invaluable in helping teams identify and resolve issues faster. When combined with analytics, it allows for early identification of potential problems and quicker troubleshooting/resolution times, saving valuable business resources while improving customer satisfaction.

DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams must oversee an enormous volume and variety of data from cloud environments, microservices, and more - which results in an intricate web of interdependencies that are hard to monitor or monitor and analyze without proper tools. With Sumo Logic as an observability platform, teams can gain visibility into key telemetry data that provides context for service performance, quickly detect issues, and isolate them more rapidly while shortening detection/resolution times while automating triage to enable more reliable monitoring overall.

Observability also supports an agile and secure application development process by helping developers better understand their applications' performance based on the generated telemetry data. This enables faster identification and resolution of issues and enhanced end-user experience; optimizing business processes while cutting costs are other potential benefits of this type of data analysis.

Contrasting with monitoring tools, observability solutions actively aggregate relevant data to quickly identify and respond to more predictable application, system, or infrastructure issues. By drawing upon logs, metrics, and traces from your architecture as an umbrella of observation for these solutions, they provide engineers with insights into knock-on effects in complex chains that would otherwise remain hidden by monitoring alone.

An observability platform allows teams to ensure that the data being analyzed is correct, helping prevent errors and costly delays when deploying pipelines that move data sets from sources to repositories such as big data warehouses.

FAQ section

Observability Vs Monitoring