Using the Power of Observability to Drive Success in Complicated IT Environments

By Shriram Pore

By proactively collecting and analyzing data on a real-time basis, observability platforms equip organizations with the ability to transform the operational efficiency of their highly complex and interconnected IT systems.

Amidst the ever-increasing complexity, monitoring and management of IT systems have assumed critical importance for businesses across industry verticals. Even a small oversight can cost dear as IT systems have become indispensable for ensuring the growth and profitability of firms. Observability allows firms to optimize their IT resources and by generating, analyzing, and applying insights, these platforms can help firms run their operations seamlessly. Read on to learn more about observability and its potential to elevate operational efficiency and business performance:

Importance of Observability

Modern IT systems demand a comprehensive approach to studying the behaviour of each element involved in the intricately connected ecosystem of devices, networks, infrastructure and Applications. Adding to this complexity is the distributed nature of these systems which has been fueled by the rapidly growing appeal of cloud computing, thereby making it difficult for firms to have a centralized view of their utilization, efficiency and performance. Further, the dynamic nature of IT systems is marked by constant updates, (re)configurations, and (re)installation of new packages adding to the complexity, thereby mandating firms to adopt observability for efficiently monitoring and managing the health of their IT resources.

Key aspects of Observability

Observability can aid firms in assessing, maintaining, and upgrading the health of their IT systems and resources.  By using telemetry data collection and analysis, observability can uncover hidden patterns, reveal operational challenges, and identify potential bottlenecks in systems. These insights, in turn, help system engineers to identify problems and get ready with feasible solutions even before the actual breakdown happens. Given below are specific measures that demonstrate how observability can help in running IT systems to their optimum:

• Holistic Approach: Observability works on three comprehensive pillars of logs, traces, and metrics and by clubbing together observations from all these three indices, the approach offers an all-encompassing perspective of IT systems and infrastructure to organizations. The insights generated from the analysis can help engineers evaluate intricate relationships between system components, performance issues, potential bottlenecks, and plausible solutions to tackle anomalies as and when they appear.
• Real-time Analysis: Unlike conventional monitoring and management tools that work on static metrics, observability boasts dynamic and real-time data analysis capabilities. This distinctive ability of observability platforms helps firms with real-time, granular details of operative health and performance of systems. This information can be then used to proactively plan and rapidly deploy the response/recovery mechanism to mitigate losses from unexpected behaviours, errors, or deviations by IT resources.
• Flexibility and Scalability: Observability platforms are highly flexible and unlike other mechanisms, these can be configured without any extensive setup requirements. These solutions can collect data from a variety of resources and can be integrated with existing monitoring setups with ease. This inherent versatility also enables firms to scale up observability solutions easily in response to the constantly changing requirements on the business front.

What Observability has to offer (via Tools and Techniques)?

By offering holistic visibility, proactive mitigation, and superior response capabilities, observability can help improve the overall system performance significantly. While the observability platforms offer a host of tools and technologies, here is what prominent ones to offer; capable of enhancing the performance of IT systems in areas as following:

• Enhanced Root Cause Analysis: By offering a comprehensive inside view of logs, observability enables faster tracing of request flows through a complex web of interrelated IT systems and networks. This enhanced capability helps system teams to quickly pinpoint the root cause of the problem and offer solutions proactively, thereby minimizing downtime and subsequent loss of resources. The speedy repair and recovery mechanism, in turn, increases the reliability of the systems and delivers superior experiences to the target market.
• Active Anomaly Detection: Compared to conventional systems, observability can proactively detect anomalies by collecting, analyzing, and evaluating data on important indicators of performance. This proactive approach also proves instrumental in detecting any deviant behaviour speedily and applying remedial measures to keep the issues from escalating into critical problems.
• Improved performance: Thanks to the 360-degree approach used by observability platforms, firms can speedily identify bottlenecks, optimize resource allocations, and make data-based decisions to achieve improved performance output of their IT resources. The benefits of improved performance can be then realized in terms of better customer experiences, strengthened brand loyalty, and improved market performance among others.
• Distributed Architecture Support: The process of software development has gone through a sea change with microservices and distributed architectures increasingly becoming the mainstay of the modern development process. Against this background, the use of a multifaceted approach of observability is highly beneficial as it allows firms to trace requests from multiple resources spread across different locations and time zones, thereby equipping engineers with granular visibility to improve efficiency and optimize performance.

The role, importance, and relevance of observability platforms in this day and age couldn’t be overemphasized. In fact, with the escalating complexity of IT systems marked by distributed architectures, cloud computing, and connected infrastructures, observability has emerged as a tool of strategic relevance having far-reaching consequences for system performance and firms’ profitability. In sum, organizations which aspire to lead their segments must have observability at the core to optimize their performance and stay ahead of the growth curve by delivering superior experiences to their target markets. 

(The author is Shriram Pore, Vice President – Engineering, MSys Technologies, and the views expressed in this article are his own)