You Need Observability, Not Just Monitoring
Observability instruments systems and applications, collects metrics and logs, and enables an understanding of system behavior. Observability goes beyond traditional monitoring approaches to explain system behavior over time and provide accurate operational insights. And, in alignment with the new direction of DevOps, observability examines the sequence of a problem through monitoring, correlating the system data, and automating with ML. Observability provides DevOps with end-to-end system visibility to quickly respond, fix, and prevent problems. Observability helps organizations:
- Speed up response to resolving slowdowns and bottlenecks.
- Understand and improve the user experience.
- Improve DevOps agility and efficiency.
Monitoring and Observability. Why You Need Both.
Observability and monitoring are complementary solutions, meaning one does not replace the other. Effective monitoring almost always includes observability.
Monitoring collects metrics and logs that provide information on whether the system is working, and it tells you when something went wrong. Put another way, monitoring is building your systems to collect data, with the goal of knowing when something goes wrong and starting your response quickly.
Observability instruments your systems with tools to gather actionable data that provides not only the when of an error or issue, but—more importantly—the why. Observability typically shortens the duration and reduces the impact of incidents.
End-to-End Visibility with Actionable Insights
While today’s world of accelerated cloud and microservices adoption has greatly advanced innovation and helped organizations reduce time to market, it has also increased operational complexity resulting in increasingly ephemeral environments with unpredictable behavior. Because of constant and dynamic change, siloed solutions that don’t work across platforms, and the scale of the environments, simply monitoring isn’t enough. By instrumenting systems and applications, and collecting metrics and logs that enable the understanding of system behavior, observability allows you to:
- Create end-to-end system visibility
- Examine the sequence of a problem through monitoring, correlating system data, and automating with AI and ML.
- Get accurate operational insights.
- Explain system behavior over time.
- Implementing a culture of system observability can transform an organization from being reactive to proactive to predictive.
How to Implement Cloud Observability Like a Pro
Achieve big data observability in the cloud by adopting three key techniques.
Automation is a Must Have
Although many big data performance solutions implement AI and ML to automate, many DevOps teams are still manually tuning, and they are spending a lot of time on it. However, the volume, velocity, and variety of the data being collected is fundamentally unmanageable by humans. The scale—thousands of applications per day and a growth rate of dozens of nodes per year—is too large for manual efforts. Even the most experienced IT operations teams and capacity planners can’t manually tune every application and workflow with the required precision and speed.
Achieve Observability and Maximize Collaboration
After understanding the value and benefits of observability, the next is implementing it. Although many monitoring vendors claim to have full observability capabilities, they only offer a portion of the picture and not full observability. Pepperdata big data performance solutions provide you with the observability you need to optimize the performance of your big data deployment and improve collaboration.
- Learn More About Application Spotlight – Get a 360° view of all your applications—in the context of the big data cluster—all in one place.
- Learn More About Platform Spotlight – Get a correlated view of cloud and on-premises infrastructure to quickly diagnose performance issues and make resource decisions.
- Learn More About Capacity Optimizer – Automatically improve big data cluster performance without manual tuning.