Defining observability leaders

By David Rubinstein

in its “state of observability 2023” study, monitoring and digital transformation company splunk defines leaders in observability as organizations with at least two years of experience with observability that have achieved the highest rank in five factors: l ability to correlate data across all observability tools l adoption of ai/ML technology within their observability tools l Having specialized skills in observability l ability to cover both cloud-native and traditional application architectures l adoption of aiops other key findings from the study include that observability leaders experience one-third fewer outages per year than beginners; have greater visual clarity that gives organizations the ability to find and fix problems faster; are confident in their ability to meet availability and performance requirements; unify visibility across environments; and understand that aiops is instrumental to customer experience by determining the root cause of an issue, predicting problems before they become customerfacing incidents, and assessing the severity of an incident

“With the rising complexity of today’s technology environments and the direct connection between reducing disruptions and optimal customer experiences, observability is fundamental to the successful op- erations of modern businesses,” spiros Xanthos, senior vice president and general manager for the observability business at splunk, said in the announcement of the report “observability enables businesses to keep their software and infrastructure reliable, systems secure and customers happy, making it a critical component to any organization’s resilience strategy ”

Where testing comes in

for digital businesses, the most important perspective is that of the people using your applications so, apica’s Jolley noted, if you’re not actively monitoring the full user experience, you’re not really monitoring, you’re simply observing and observation, without definitive ways or actions to be done, is useless

“i can look at something all the livelong day, i can look at my kitchen being dirty, because my kids left a mess but if i don’t go in there and clean it, or yell at my kids, it’s gonna stay a mess. so that’s what these observability players are missing the most, that they have no way to compare the baseline They have no way to look at how things actually work and then they have no way to actually fix it in a relatively short time frame so all these tools are dedicated towards finding component pieces for how these things work. but they’re all easter eggs, because they’re not ac- tually exposing the real problem ”

With many different components making up a user experience user interface, security, third-party and open-source software, aPis, cloud environments and more testing can provide an understanding of the health of the application. Testing teams can build tests and create different scenarios that test all those components, Jolley said. and then those test scripts can be re-run at scale for load testing, or the scripts can be broken into pieces to be made smaller for things like unit testing

“once the testing phase is over, you want to go to the typical blue/green deployment environment in the cloud,” he continued “once you do your blue testing, because you have a good baseline on what your performance looks like, then you take those same scripts and turn them on for monitoring ” That way, he said, you’re using the same scripts with consistent understanding, with the same set of times series data over a protracted period of time “and what you can gather from that is actually a percentage of health over baseline so not only can you understand what the health of your service is, up or down, but you can actually understand what the performance characteristics look like ” instead of having to guess if you’re providing a good end user experience, you can actually tell if you are, he noted. n