The road to digital transformation isn’t straightforward, but it gets easier with DevOps and cloud computing. As critical enablers of digital transformation, DevOps and Cloud Computing. Such is observability, a critical practice to enable digital transformation by providing a real-time performance analysis. Simply put, observability is the ability to evaluate the internal modules of a system by inspecting the system’s overall output.
DevOps specialists often lack proper visibility in their CI/CD pipeline. If this persists, your end-users will find the bottleneck before you do! When it comes to understanding observability, you’ll come across several definitions on the internet. Moreover, they morph all the time. Nevertheless, to make someone understand the essence of observability, the general idea is to empower IT professionals to ask questions about applications and the infrastructure that runs them.
You often must have encountered instances where a DevOps engineer says they can’t see persisting issues. When an IT professional doesn’t have access to a platform or a tool that can answer questions you can’t think of, you’ll be rendered blind. Asking the right questions when a digital infrastructure is up and running will help you to gauge downtime or misconfigurations, among other issues. That’s what observability is about, answering questions about the digital infrastructure as well as being able to ask questions.
Observability improves cloud-native application and infrastructure performance greatly
It has been applied among distributed IT infrastructure for almost a decade to improve its performance. To provide better visibility on applications and IT infrastructure, observability relies on three telemetry data, such as:
- Logs
- Metrics
- Traces
These telemetry data will provide much-needed visibility and allow you to understand the root cause of the issues. The end goal is to improve performance.
In the last decade, businesses around the world have adapted cloud-native infrastructure in the form of serverless, microservice, and container technologies, among others. In these distributed infrastructures, tracing any event to its point of origin requires thousands of processes. These processes would be needed to run on the cloud, on-premises, or both.
Conventional techniques to monitor an IT or cloud infrastructure will incur a struggle. Tracking the overall communication interdependencies and pathways in distributed architecture needs solutions like an observability platform.
With Cloud, IT, and Application observability, you can:
- Monitor the modern systems effectively and efficiently
- Assess and connect the effects of the complex chain. At the same time, trace it back to the roots
- From system admins to developers and IT operations analysts, everyone can oversee the entire distributed architecture
Observability V/S Monitoring
Usually, people use monitoring observability to describe either of them. As we burst the bubble, we’d like to tell you monitoring and observability are completely different. The only common element between the both is that they are interdependent.
| Monitoring | Observability |
|---|---|
| Monitoring is basically an action that IT professionals, DevOps engineers, system admins, and developers perform to enhance the overall observability of the system | On the other hand, observability is the property of the said system. Better described as testability & functionality. |
Observability denotes gauging how great a system’s internal states can infer knowledge from external outputs. Observability is more of a reactive module as compared to the proactive monitoring module. With traces, logs, and metrics gathered from the IT infrastructure, the process will provide insights into identifying flaws, system health, and weak attack vectors at the first signs of errors.
A simple way to explain this is that observability is a broad concept that also includes monitoring. However, monitoring is a specific practice that leads to achieving observability. Monitoring will allow you to collect data regarding a system actively. The data detect anomalies or problems lurking deep in the system.
CloudZenix simplifies visibility and gauging of your Hybrid Infrastructure
Maintaining Cloud-native hybrid IT infrastructures to gauge performances and anomalies is the need of the hour. As digital transformation is significantly underway, it’s become difficult for IT professionals to identify the root causes. CloudZenix understands the numerous benefits that come with observability. Hence its DevOps and Cloud Computing solutions revolve around observability that eases your digital transformation journey. Understanding the need to have observability practices over conventional monitoring empowers us to help your customers to have robust insights into their hybrid IT infrastructure.
Why would you simply monitor your hybrid IT infrastructure when you can assess it entirely with ‘metrics, logs, and traces?’ When these three pillars of modern-day observability work together, they show your infrastructure’s health and performance. These pillars have unique sets of properties and their underlying limitations; that’s why they are employed together. With our DevOps and Cloud Computing services, you can:
- Monitor the entire infrastructure without breaking a sweat
- Track all the microservices and applications that are running to offer 100% insight into the infrastructure, system, and application performance
- Detect vulnerabilities in your infrastructure that eliminates the classic case of zero false positive
- Get insights into your business with respect to the operational environment
As a digital transformation provider, CloudZenix understands the critical relationship between systems in IT infrastructure, cloud environment, and applications. To take the first step into your digital transformation journey and practice observability, click here or email info@cloudzenix.com
