Observability

G U I D E F O R B U Y E R S

By David Rubinstein

in a world that’s gone from developers delivering features for the business to delivering products to users, the customer experience is now the top driver for many organizations creating software so, how do these organizations know how their applications and websites are treating customers?

Through observation but today’s observability bears little resemblance to the days of performance monitoring and Network operations Centers.

observability grew out of the complexities of running cloud-native applications, where insights into third-party application components and their aPis, as well as into containers and infrastructure and more, are critical to keeping those applications running smoothly That, coupled with the need for businesses to understand the experiences their customers and potential customers are having, means it’s critical to have an eye on every layer that impacts how an application is performing and it’s not just how the app itself is performing now it’s about security and infrastructure issues, which have to be monitored to prevent disruptions that can cost businesses heavily “ultimately, it’s about knowing what’s happening with the services, getting insights into the services, and ultimately, what impact they have on the business,” explained Carlos Casanova, principal analyst at forrester in the early talk of performance monitoring, terms like user experience were used to imply business outcomes Today, he said, “We’ve kind of matured, and refined our terminology to be all the eX (employee experience) and dX (devel- oper experience) and uX, and whoever else knows what the next X is and i don’t think it will end there ” a “state of observability 2023” study released earlier this month by the enterprise strategy group on behalf of digital transformation company splunk revealed that downtime can cost organizations up to $500,000 per hour observability, the study notes, can help organizations resolve instances of unplanned downtime in mere minutes, when in the past, it could take hours or days ben Jolley, vice president of marketing for load testing and performance monitoring company apica, explained: “as a customer, you might not actually care that double-click ads aren’t loading quickly. However, as a user, if the double click ad is preventing the rest of my page from rendering and loading up, or i have these weird interstitial ads that pop up, and my entire website that i’m looking at changes, it’s probably a good idea to figure that out and figure out what it is performance-wise customers are experiencing ”

Observability is not just for cloud services

Casanova said that although observability came into its own with roots in cloud native, it’s important to look at on-premises servers and even mainframes to get a look at the full chain of events within an application to see how it impacts the experience but he said that a large percentage of the audience today doesn’t see observability going beyond the cloud-native space “ and that’s oK,” he added “if they’re defining it more in that aPM kind of realm, and addressing it there, then there’s nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t address the full capacity of systems that are out there ” but many organizations still have a big stake in running things onpremises Casanova noted that migration to the cloud is still in its early stages despite the rush to the cloud that the CoVid-19 pandemic precipitated. “it’s not like we’re at 80% migration to the cloud continued on page 4 >

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

David Rubinstein drubinstein@d2emerge com

ART DIRECTOR

Mara Leonardi mleonardi@d2emerge com

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Eli Cohen

PUBLISHER

David Lyman

978-465-2351 dlyman@d2emerge.com

MARKETING AND DIGITAL MEDIA SPECIALIST

Andrew Rockefeller arockefeller@d2emerge com

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We’re probably in the 20% range,” he said “so from an observability perspective, where it’s going, it still has a large opportunity to grow there.” observability has been easier to do on cloud-native systems because the systems have been more designed and built to be observed, he said, as opposed to commercial components or legacy systems that have taken a lift-and-shift approach to cloud migration and there are some systems that are simply not willing to be observed, such as stealth devices “if it’s deliberately keeping itself secret, it doesn’t want to put out too much into the logs. it doesn’t want to put out the telemetry that, say, a nefarious actor is going to act on so how observable is that system?” Not very observable However, he pointed out that these more sophisticated monitoring technologies, many of which employ some level of ai/ML, can infer and investigate actions in the system “it’s easy to just collect the logs, metrics and traces, and then mash them together, and then spit it back out in some kind of visuals Where the difficulty of the challenge, and where the sophistication of some of these tools comes in, is where they’re able to say, ‘i can fill in those gaps that are missing from the logs and traces and metrics with what i’ve seen before, and match it very closely to that ’” n these things into some of our different client connections but we have the ability to control a full Windows desktop environment and we can load up virtual machines on it, we can look at virtual smart devices, all these different components and again, apply the same testing functionality, and then monitor those pieces over time.