What is Observability? Benefits, Use Cases & More

Observability has been gaining importance in IT as it not only tell you when a downtime or error happened but why it happened. With the rise of new technology like cloud, DevOps, microservices, containers and virtualizations and much more, IT & DevOps guys are simultaneously working on boosting speed & reducing friction from code to generation lifecycle. They’re also firefighting complex new challenges every day. Facing that kind of trouble, observability is crucial to completely grasp what is actually occurring in your business’s applications as well as systems. However, what does this imply in the real world?

Introduction to Observability

Observability provides deep insights into all the layers of the IT infrastructure. Observability means assembling all the fragments of multiple monitoring tools working in silos and then arranging them in a way that gives actionable intelligence, thus helping IT operations teams with the resolution of critical issues quickly. Observability is combined analysis of network elements to enhance the IT surroundings with a deep comprehension of the problems as well as troubleshooting them in the root level so that it doesn’t repeat again.

Why should you bother about Observability?

These are the following reasons why network Observability matters:

• Improves the app development environment by providing information needed to enhance it
• Helps in understanding what’s happening behind the scenes for any IT issue
• Enables catching issues which are unknown and assists in understanding how to manage them
• Detecting IT problems without observability in place is inefficient and time consuming
• Puts DevOps teams in smooth motion with smart analysis of development environment

How do Observability Platforms Work?

Observability platform is known for being the unified umbrella platform which saves IT professionals from the rain of downtime & outages. It also includes the process of reviewing events, metrics, and traces along with complete IT infrastructure monitoring.

To gain insights, the observability platform parses log, flow, metrics and traces to understand and interpret actionable intelligence from them faster. Once data is aggregated it manages and monitors for suspicious activity.

Apart from logging, observability platform has correlation engine which correlates the alarms generated from network monitoring, log management, and network traffic. We’ve a separate blog on correlation and the importance of it in day to day life. You may read it to get a background idea.

Myths about Observability

Observability and monitoring are two different concepts. They’re often confused as the same thing. We recently busted these misconceptions in our latest blog. While observability is loved by DevOps & IT Ops teams, monitoring is Net Ops team’s backbone. Network monitoring tools and observability platforms have a lot in common. We will leave this as mystery for you here, read this blog to know more about how observability and network monitoring are different from each other.

There are some common use cases which both of them share:

• Detecting Problems: Usually by alarms, or looking at issues on dashboards
• Finding Resolution for Problem: Finding answers to “why something went wrong”.
• Continuous Improvement: Reporting & documenting

Benefits of Observability

• Helps DevOps teams understand what’s really going on in development phase
• Monitors the operation of software and applications and how its performing
• Helps In identifying the root causes of problems and aids in troubleshooting
• With intuitive dashboards, it helps NetOps teams observe what’s happening in real-time
• Allows self-healing infrastructure also known as IT automation

How to adopt to new-age Observability?

Observability is vital for IT Ops, and DevOps teams. To adopt Observability, together with events, logs, flow and traces intake, DevOps teams must add code to the applications to have the ability to supply more additional data that can be used to enable alarms. DevOps run automated tests before and after deploying software, to understand if anything broke or not. With Observability platform all this can be automated and now after reading the blog you know why!

Motadata is going to launch 8.0 platform which has AI powered Observability Platform. The platform does complete IT stack monitoring of all the layers of IT infrastructure from physical network to application layer including your cloud infrastructure. As single platform provides deep insights about the states of the network elements, there is zero information silo. Everything is in sync! Unlike other tools where they gather data from multiple monitoring tools then showcase data analytics on their dashboard. While putting multiple systems together there is a very high possibility of missing out on some overlooked yet important metrics which might have been useful in the time of the need. Motadata’s unified observability is going to have a layer of AI over it for added intelligence on top of deep insights. To be the first one to know about this powerful platform, please feel free to drop an email on sales@motadata.com