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There are many questions surrounding observability. Three that immediately come to mind: What should I look for in an observable solution? What benefits does my company get from observability? Heck, is observation a noun or a verb?
I recently sat down with guest Forrester Chief Analyst Carlos Casanova to answer these questions. In a recent webinar, “Observability Today, Tomorrow and the Future: Cutting Through the Noise,” “What is cloud-native observability?” We separate. And share the reasons why observability leads to better business results.
As a quick preview of our conversation, I’ve summarized our conversation below.
Unintended consequences of adopting cloud native
Rachel Deans
Rachel leads product and technical marketing for Chronosphere. Previously, Rachel wore multiple marketing hats at CloudHealth (acquired by VMware), and led product marketing for cloud-integrated storage at NetApp. She also spent many years as an analyst at Forrester Research. Outside of work, Rachel tries to keep up with her young son and dog, and when she has time, she enjoys working and dining at local restaurants in Boston, where she is based.
We started by laying out the client landscape and describing some of the unexpected consequences of moving to cloud native. There’s a reason more companies are embracing cloud native – it’s become necessary to keep pace in today’s high-speed, highly competitive landscape.
While the benefits of cloud native-like efficiency and speed are very real, they come with some unexpected challenges. For example, observable data—that is, the telemetry you need to monitor and track your systems, such as logs, metrics, and distributed traces—is increasing faster than commercial data production. As we move to the cloud and then cloud native – microservices and containers – data volume starts to increase exponentially.
Looking for an example of how a cloud native observability solution can help? Uncommon Security, a fast-growing SaaS email security startup, has improved the reliability and stability of its measurement system with Chronosphere Observability. It flattens large spikes metrically and improves overall stability over 99.9% clock.
This trend might be easy to rationalize if more telemetry leads to better results – most of us would be willing to put up with the pain of getting more data if it meant faster mean time to resolution (MTTR) or fewer critical events.
Instead, companies are getting more observable data than they can effectively use. Their monitoring solutions are becoming more expensive, but companies are not increasing their prices. In many cases, the price is actively decreasing. A cloud-native observability solution helps solve this data-growth challenge.
But what is observability?
Sometimes the first step to fixing a problem is to step back and reevaluate what we’re trying to achieve. What do we mean by “observability”? When I asked Casanova this unlikely question, he had a long-ish response, which is not surprising given the complexity of today’s cloud-native architecture. In particular, some heritage monitoring providers insert themselves into the monitoring discussion, creating confusion.
Following are excerpts from Casanova’s answer, which he admitted was difficult to narrow down to two sentences. You can watch the video for a more complete recap starting around 14:30.
Casanova: In my questions and discussions with vendors and organizations trying to implement observability, it was clear that there was some confusion as to what the term was… but looking at how the DevOps community defined observability, exploring properties and patterns were not predefined.
“Observability is defined by an individual’s natural ability to share information, to allow it to be analyzed, to allow it to be analyzed,” Casanova added.
My answer is: From my recent blog, “Are the three pillars of observability still relevant”: Observability is both a practice (or process) and defines a property (or state) of a service. Like DevOps, observability is a core competency of distributed systems engineering. It’s a practice that cloud-native developers do every day in increasingly complex systems. Observability is a property of a system – whether or not it produces information that can be used to answer any question a developer asks.
Based on the three pillars—logs, metrics, and traces—engineering and SRE leaders should think about those three levels instead of focusing on observability in cloud-native environments.
- Find outFind out if there is a problem
- broke up: Stop the problem from creating more negative consequences
- know how: Dive into the root cause of the problem
why? Because the three levels of observability answer critical questions about running the code and system you build.
What should you look for in a monitoring solution?
After establishing the definition of observability, Casanova ticks off five questions to ask before adopting an observability solution. Below is his top-five list, but you can listen around 34:00 to hear him go into each point. An observation platform should provide the following:
- Ability to control data growth: Can the solution control the growth of observational data?
- Reliability: Has the solution proven to be reliable and deliver the performance for modern operations?
- Avoid vendor lock-in: What are the risks of vendor lock-in?
- Ease of Use: How easy is it for developers to use and program?
- Scalability: Can the solution scale with your organization’s growth plans?
Can observability drive competitive advantage?
How does cloud-native observability connect with positive outcomes for modern businesses? Casanova answered this question because this is an area I’m passionate about and our company has deep roots in the observatory space.
As a company, Chronosphere’s mission is to lead modern businesses to use observability as a vital competitive advantage. Tune in to ~39:00 for a quick look at Chronosphere’s origin story and our co-founders’ observability in Uber.
Casanova agrees and says that cloud native initiatives require vigilance to succeed because of the many pitfalls that come with increasing complexity and speed in cloud native environments. Additionally, a recent study by Forrester found that businesses that use key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure their infrastructure, applications and business services are more likely to experience positive revenue growth by 2021.
That’s my summary! There’s more to the entire webinar here.
The owner of TNS is an investor in Insight Partners: Uncommon Security.
Feature image via Unsplash
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