AIOPS
Observability vs. Monitoring
for DevOps professionals What precisely are the requirements of a DevOps practitioner, as opposed to an SRE, legacy developer, or operations manager? And do those specific requirements require a different approach to monitoring? BY WILL CAPPELLI, CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER EUROPE AND HEAD OF PRODUCT STRATEGY AT MOOGSOFT What is the relationship between observability and monitoring? If I am monitoring a stack with the latest tools, is there anything else I need to do to make that stack truly observable? The short answer is yes. The type of monitoring required for observability has been singled out by the market as that type of monitoring which is of particular interest to DevOps practitioners and Site Reliability Engineers (SREs). But what is it that makes observability stand out from other kinds of monitoring? In this post, I’ll discuss the requirements of a DevOps practitioner, as opposed to an SRE, legacy developer, or operations manager, and how those specific requirements require a different approach to monitoring: namely, observability-enablement.
A DevOps practitioner is primarily in the business of rapidly adding new functional components to digital services. The need for speed has forced changes on both service architecture and on the scope of a developer’s concern.
Similarly, monitoring technologies pick up various signals generated as a by-product of the actions taken by digital systems in the production environment. They transmit those signals through various pathways which add structure to the signals
With regard to service architecture, the DevOps practitioner requires extreme levels of modularity and, as a corollary, very small modules with very short life-spans. WWW.DIGITALISATIONWORLD.COM
With regard to the scope of concern, a DevOps practitioner, unlike a legacy developer, needs to maintain ongoing awareness of what is taking place in the production environment and to be able to step in to prevent or ameliorate performance issues that might affect the continuous flow of new service modules into production. (Hence, the ‘Ops’ in DevOps.) Now, in order to keep track of the production environments and the array of live digital services, the DevOps team needs some kind of monitoring. Monitoring, in many ways, replicates the process by which we, as human beings, obtain information about our environments. Signals are generated by objects, events, and fields which are transmitted through space and time, are picked up by various sense organs, and then processed by our brains and nervous systems.
What the DevOps community needs
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Furthermore, boundaries between contemporary digital services become blurred and, rather than introduce completely new services, services tend to evolve incrementally (module by module, so to speak.)
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ISSUE II 2021
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