Observability and monitoring: Two peas in a pod
An all-inclusive observability and monitoring solution is a crucial component of DevOps, positively contributing to continuous delivery — the ability to release software changes quickly, safely and on demand.
During a recent DevOps and observability best practices event, observability and monitoring were described as “two peas in a pod,” each working hand-in-hand with the other by enabling companies to understand the behavior and health of their overall IT systems.
While observability occurs when data becomes available in the system you want to monitor, monitoring happens when this data is collected and displayed. Once both transpire, you are able to analyze the data – which is why it’s observed and monitored in the first place.
Without the right tools, however, observability and its close kin monitoring are difficult, if not impossible. However, the right tools and partnerships are readily available through Arrow.
Before we get to how Arrow can help, let’s compare, contrast and take a closer look at the powerful pair.
A symbiotic relationship
Monitoring tracks the health of an application and tells you when something’s gone awry — access speeds are slow, connectivity is spotty or downtimes are up, for instance. Monitoring is essential for analyzing long-term trends, building dashboards and alerting. Plus, it shows you how apps are functioning, growing and being utilized.
Observability helps you understand the how, what and why application operations have gone sideway by providing insight and context into what has failed. Using AI, it goes beyond showing an anomaly, pinpointing where the problem is occurring so it can be solved.
Observability brings benefits to all aspects of a company’s business — not just to developers and the cyber-reliability engineering side, but all the way up into the executive ranks by showing things like customer satisfaction.
Together, monitoring and observability:
- Report whether systems are healthy and functioning as they should
- Deliver key business system metrics for deeper insights
- Provide tooling to better understand and debug systems in production
- Provide data to act upon problems in application production
Putting observability and monitoring into play
However, knowing about and building a continuously observable system are hardly one in the same. Arrow can help you through our relationships with observability and monitoring suppliers.
Seek an observability suite that ingests, monitors, visualizes and analyzes data, enabling you to make actionable insights: its infrastructure monitoring capability helps you avoid downtime as it monitors and troubleshoots your entire infrastructure, whether physical, virtual or in the cloud.
It then analyzes and sends alerts on trace data to optimize application performance and provide improved customer experience. What’s more, it improves incident response through mean-time-to-acknowledgement through a streamlined interface that can be used from anywhere.
Measuring and making sense of the two
Once your organization employs an observability and monitoring solution, it should track metrics to gain a better understanding of how well these systems are working for your company, enabling you to make changes to improve.
Here are some internal metrics worth tracking:
- False positives: How many false positives aren’t actionable because they ended up working as intended?
- False negatives: Conversely, when did a failure occur where alerting either didn’t happen or was much later than it should have been?
- Alert creation, acknowledgement and more: How many alerts were created in a specific timeframe, and how many were recognized within a certain deadline? How many alerts were deemed unactionable because either an alert wasn’t understood or wasn’t acted upon right away?
Although this list is not comprehensive, it provides a sampling of some of the metrics an observability and monitoring system should track. Arrow can help you build out a wide-ranging list of metrics you should be looking for.
A rapidly growing DevOps practice for a rapidly growing market
DevOps observability and monitoring drive higher software delivery, which, in turn, increases the performance of an organization. Each relies on the other: While monitoring tracks what’s going wrong within an application, observability provides insight and context by showing what has failed so the issue can be resolved.
Since there are several metrics that can be tracked with an observability and monitoring solution, Arrow can help you figure out which ones would be the most beneficial for your business.
With a rapidly growing number of suppliers, Arrow helps your customers integrate their software development and IT teams, so they can build, test, and release software faster — with more speed, agility and reliability.
Read more about implementing DevOps practices within your business or contact us to learn how Arrow can help.
This article was originally published in January 2021 and has been updated for relevancy.
