The complexity of cloud-native application architecture and distributed systems means we need more than just traditional monitoring to effectively understand what is happening in an application. That is at the core of the practicality behind the concept of observability. Complex systems require continuous understanding in order to improve and debug.
Aqlix Cloud & DevOps Solutions aim to help insert observability into cloud-native frameworks from the ground up. We aim to help predictively identify and surface signals. By doing so, we strive to reduce major customer business impacting service outages.
Why Observability Matters for Cloud-Native Applications
Cloud-native applications rely on the interconnection of many services, each of which can fail on their own, causing a cumulative failure that can be difficult to understand in the context of a single system using a traditional monitoring tool. Observability helps to analyze the failure of a service in the context of the rest of the system. The failure of one service can result in failure of many services and can be difficult to understand when only looking at individual services.
1. Moving Beyond Traditional Monitoring
The nature of monitoring means a system failure is recorded, however monitoring tools do not explain the failing cause. This lack of information causes engineers to provide best guess answers in fast failing systems.
Observability provides the context required to understand the root cause failing system. This provides engineers the needed information to develop expert systems with observability built into the framework.
- Root cause visibility: Teams can stop chasing symptoms and find the actual cause of an issue.
- Faster incident response: Having rich context eliminates a majority of the guesswork in the early stages of troubleshooting.
2. Managing Complexity Across Distributed Systems
Each discrete unit in a cloud-native application may be an individual service running on its own and, therefore, be able to fail independently from the other services. It is nearly impossible to manage the troubleshooting of a problem that traverses many systems. Cloud platforms like google cloud support better visibility across distributed systems.
Without these tools, service-related request tracing creates a map of the request path and shows boundaries of failures and latency of different services. This is useful when an architecture expands beyond a few closely connected components.
- End-to-end request tracing: A trace of each step a request takes across services becomes visible.
- Isolated failure detection: Problems become visible in a service without the need to disrupt or misdiagnose unrelated services.
3. Reducing Mean Time to Resolution
With each passing moment during an outage, not only customers become more frustrated, but engineers have additional pressure as they are not able to resolve the outage. Poor system visibility extends the time spent in an outage.
Strong observability practices compress this window considerably, giving teams the information needed to identify and resolve issues faster. Businesses with mature observability practices typically resolve incidents in a fraction of the time less visible systems require.
- Faster diagnosis: With contextual data, finding the root cause no longer requires a lengthy manual investigation.
- Reduced customer impact: The impact on the customer decreases with less time needed to resolve an issue. Take less time to resolve.
Building an Effective Observability Strategy
You need more than a monitoring dashboard on top of existing systems to build an effective observability strategy. It involves designing applications and infrastructure to make meaningful data visible throughout the entire development and deployment lifecycle. An effective observability strategy is not a feature tacked on once something breaks in production. It is a design decision made alongside architecture.
1. Combining Metrics, Logs, and Traces
Metrics provide overall system health, logs provide event data recorded at a given point in time, and traces provide a view of how requests are made to multiple services and cross-cutting component boundaries. Relying on any one of these three provides a significant impact on system visibility.
An effective observability strategy provides the combination of the three, the complete system visibility, and the flexibility to investigate different levels of the system as needed.
- Complete system visibility: Applying metrics, logs, and traces together show complete visibility of the entire system.
- Flexible investigation: Teams can increase their visibility of the system based on the priority of the problem.
2. Choosing the Right Observability Tools
There are many observability tools available, with varying strengths in different areas such as total cost to own and maintain, scalability, and integration. The observability tool you choose needs to provide adequate coverage without increasing the workload on your engineering teams.
Aqlix technology consulting evaluates each business’s solution based on their system’s architecture and the sizes of their teams. Choice of solution is dependent on the teams’ sizes and the intricacies of systems being monitored, as well as the existing architecture.
- Tool-architecture fit: The right tool selection will depend on the architecture of your systems, not a list of features or marketing claims.
- Manageable operational overhead: A well-chosen toolset avoids adding unnecessary complexity for the team maintaining it.
3. Embedding Observability Into the Development Process
The most effective way to integrate Observability is to bake it into your systems as you build them, as opposed to integrating it as an afterthought once the system is in production. Building visibility into systems after the fact is much more time-consuming and expensive than building in Observability from the beginning.
Aqlix incorporates Observability into our application modernization services to ensure that new systems have true Observability as opposed to simply monitored systems.
- Built-in visibility: Incorporating Designing Observability into your systems helps fill gaps caused by retroactively designing Observability systems.
- Smoother modernization: When Observability is added during the rebuild of legacy systems, visibility is achieved during the rebuilding process.
Conclusion
As cloud-native architecture grows more distributed and complex, basic monitoring becomes less reliable and increases the time needed to resolve complicated systems. Observability provides the depth teams require to understand complex systems.
Aqlix IT Solutions focuses on building Observability from the ground up to incorporate it into your applications and infrastructure. Our team can assist you with addressing your team’s inability to quickly resolve issues.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is observability in software systems?
With observability, we seek to understand the internal state of a system through the output of the system (metrics, logs, and traces). It goes beyond traditional monitoring to help teams answer why a certain event occurred rather than informing them that the event occurred.
How is observability different from traditional monitoring?
Monitoring notifies teams when an event of interest occurs. An observability-centric approach helps teams explain the context around the event. Especially with the complexity of modern cloud-native distributed applications, observability helps answer the many why’s of a system’s behavior.
Is observability only necessary for large, complex applications?
Distributed applications of any size need observability. It is best practice to design for observability from the start to avoid the costs of building observability retroactively.
What are the core components of an observability strategy?
Observability relies on metrics, logs, and traces. While metrics focus on quantity, and logs focus on detail, traces focus on context and correlations. All three united offer deep visibility into a system.
How can my business start improving observability?
Observability starts with self assessment and evaluation of the transparency and areas of your systems you cannot see. Aqlix can address the blind spots your team has on your unique problems and architectural challenges as well as areas being blocked by an unknown capacity.
