DevOps is no more a buzzword. In recent years, it has emerged as the most sought-after software development methodology in the digital world. IT organizations across the globe have promptly embarked on the DevOps journey to strike the balance between development and operations teams for faster product delivery.
There’s no question that many businesses have successfully adopted DevOps practices to develop and deliver high-quality software, swiftly and securely. However, there are many more businesses that have failed to realize the true potential of the DevOps methodology. In fact, a Gartner research revealed that 75% of DevOps initiatives fail to meet full expectations in 2022. Why? There may be many reasons for DevOps failure, but overlooking observability is considered to be the prime culprit.
So, what is observability in DevOps, and how businesses can leverage it to tap optimal DevOps potential? Let’s dig deep…
What is observability in DevOps?
In general, observability is described as the ability of a business to gain valuable insights about the internal state or condition of a system just by analyzing data from its external outputs. If a system is said to be highly observable then it means that businesses can promptly analyze the root cause of an identified performance issue, without any need for testing or coding.
In DevOps, observability is referred to the software tools and methodologies that help Dev and Ops teams to log, collect, correlate, and analyze massive amounts of performance data from a distributed application and glean real-time insights. This empowers teams to effectively monitor, revamp, and enhance the application to deliver a better customer experience.
Suggested Read: DevOps Orchestration: Looking Beyond Automation
Why DevOps observability is the future and why your organization needs it
In the past, IT businesses have used Application Performance Monitoring (APM) to monitor and enhance application performance. It collects and analyzes telemetry data of the applications and systems and provides valuable insights for teams to address and prevent abnormal conditions. However, APM is the right fit only for monolithic applications or traditional distributed applications. It is because in those applications, the new code is released regularly and workflows and dependencies are well-known and easy to identify.
But in the present world, the highly distributed nature of the applications has made APM obsolete. Organizations today are leveraging DevOps practices, including agile development, continuous integration & continuous deployment (CI/CD), to deliver applications faster than ever. And, APM can’t stay abreast. The DevOps ecosystem required high-quality telemetry data to create accurate, context-rich, fully-correlated information of every application. Therefore, organizations need DevOps observability to gain high visibility of their complex application ecosystem, understand any change (planned or unplanned), and stay ahead of the curve.
Observability vs Monitoring: What are the differences
Though observability has gained huge prominence in recent times, there is a lot more to it than meets the eye. Observability is often used interchangeably with monitoring. In reality, both concepts differ from each other. Let’s find out how they are different:
Monitoring enables IT teams to gain a comprehensive picture of an application’s behavior and performance, with metrics such as network traffic, resource utilization, and trends. It also notifies the teams when an issue arises.
Observability, on the other hand, offers deep visibility and awareness of what is happening within an application. It collects application data and converts it into enriched, visualized information and actionable insights, enabling DevOps teams to see what is happening and address issues promptly. In contrast, monitoring doesn’t facilitate enhanced data and solutions to fix glitches.
Observability is intended for deep and granular insights, context, and debugging capabilities. Whereas, monitoring is not for deep root cause analysis. In fact, observability goes beyond monitoring methods to better address the increasingly distributed and dynamic nature of present-day applications. Observability doesn’t displace monitoring, rather it facilitates better monitoring.
Observability vs Monitoring vs Telemetry: What should you choose?
Apart from monitoring, there is another buzzword that is being used very often in the DevOps ecosystem. It is telemetry. Let’s dig into the details:
Telemetry is a mechanism for collecting actionable data from monitoring. This telemetry data when deployed into the production environment enables DevOps teams to automate feedback process and monitor applications in real-time.
Going the extra mile, observability gleans valuable insights from the application telemetry data and leads teams directly to the root cause of any issue and address it quickly. With observability, businesses can intelligently troubleshoot and correlate application issues, no matter the complexity of that app.
Organizations must take due cognizance of the fact that observability helps stay on top of any application issue throughout the software development lifecycle. It provides insights into the infrastructure and systems, while offering high visibility into their health in real-time. Simply put, observability goes beyond monitoring and telemetry to solve the problems and ultimately create a better customer experience. These enticing features make observability the need of the hour in the current speed-driven software world.
The three pillars of observability
Observability focuses on three types of telemetry data, that are widely known as the ‘three pillars of observability’. These telemetry data types are separate data types with their dashboards. Here’s a quick breakdown of the three pillars of observability:
