The year is over, and the word ”observability” has always been one of the buzzwords that everyone checks all year round. These organizations do not want to spare no effort to maintain performance and provide powerful services from “monitoring” practices to “observability”, “telemetry”, and visibility capabilities. Therefore, let us gain an in-depth understanding of the meaning of each term and understand their importance to business growth.
What is observability?
Shaun McCormick, a senior engineer at Big Commerce, explained the idea behind observability. It is not to know whether a problem is happening, but first to know why the problem is happening and how people can solve it.
The only way to maintain sustainable development in a competitive market is to adopt market demand and provide strong services. In order to achieve fit, enterprises adopt a multi-layer architecture and integrated operations with AI and ML. The practice of observability helps developers better understand multi-layer architectures and answer questions such as what is slow, why is it slow, what is broken, and what can be done to improve performance.
What is network monitoring?
Network monitoring is the practice of systematically collecting and analyzing data to keep infrastructure and applications running seamlessly. Network monitoring has always been a common practice in large multi-layer architectures.
Monitoring is essential for long-term trends and analyzing historical data to build powerful dashboards. In addition, monitoring can help you understand your application, its functions and utilization. The problem with monitoring complex distributed applications is that production failures are not linear and therefore difficult to predict.
Telemetry
Telemetry is composed of the words Telemetry and Telemetry. Tele represents distance, while Meter represents measurement. Therefore, telemetry, collecting data from remote systems. Some people may claim that monitoring tools also collect data from remote systems. Well, traditional monitoring tools also collect indicators from remote servers.
The concept of telemetry is not idealized as collecting data from various sources, but rather standardizes the process of collecting data in a distributed, multi-layer hybrid cloud environment.
Cloud-native applications rely on a telemetry environment in which data is collected and transmitted to a centralized location for automatic further analysis.
Kubernetes comes with some built-in features, such as Heapster. However, the telemetry function is integrated with the Kubernetes control panel in most places.
Basically, three kinds of telemetry data can be monitored and analyzed. Logs, indicators, and traces.
Logs: data, timestamps, and records of events, which help identify system behavior and provide detailed and powerful insights to make data-driven decisions. It helps to better understand the system, use historical data to solve problems faster, and predict potential problems through learning patterns and behaviors.
Indicator: The basic principle of monitoring, counting, counting, or measurement generated over a period of time. These indicators will provide information such as memory utilization, memory used, and the number of requests generated and managed for a particular event or application.
Trace: A trace is a footprint, therefore, it leaves historical data. The trace shows the path of the operation and how it is executed for each transaction or request in a distributed multi-layer system.
Observability and application performance monitoring
Traditional APM solutions sample data. It has less than one percent of historical data that needs to be debugged. Therefore, in the case of failure and root cause analysis, the chance of debugging the event and resolving it with the help of APM is small and small.
Even after the root cause is detected, it takes time to perform a retest. This will greatly increase MTTR’s efforts. These tools use an agent-based approach and require additional integration of containers and cloud environments.
In addition, at some point, the data will become a summary, because you no longer have complete historical data, so you cannot choose to review the old data to discover inefficiency in the system.
Network observability advantage
Network observability is not limited to IT leaders or network administrators. It is suitable for everyone. The following are the observable advantages of roles in IT enterprises.
Developers: By reducing maintenance and continuous manual monitoring, observability features make developers’ lives easier. Real-time tracking, root cause analysis, and historical data enable developers to spend less time.
Team: Observability provides visibility and context for the entire organization; therefore, administrators, managers, and developers share the same views and insights for specific applications, services, and customers.
Business scope: Ultimately, employees and teams perform seamless operations to provide better services and promote business growth. It gives the company the confidence to make key decisions and the ability to debug events in the event of a failure.
Network observability use case
Where the Net Op team likes to monitor, observability is widely used by DevOps and IT Ops teams. The strategies and methods for applying observability practices in any enterprise vary from requirement to requirement. Some observable use cases are given below.
Troubleshooting: Detecting problems and detailed troubleshooting can prevent any potential damage. Companies can set up alerts or gain powerful insights from dashboards to achieve matching.
Positive approach: Instead of reacting to observable things on board, the system begins to take proactive actions to protect the system before any possible problems occur.
Continuous improvement: reporting and log tracking capabilities make the system more intelligent and advanced, with historical data and behavior.
Adopt observability
Network observability has become essential for IT operations and DevOps teams. The IT team needs to integrate code into the application to enable alerts. With observability, integration and operations can be automated, and the team can be vigilant for upcoming events.
