As IT infrastructures increase in scale and complexity, IT teams face tremendous pressure to track and resolve the issues across the entire IT environment. As a result, ITOps, DevOps, and SRE teams must have greater observability of these progressively more diverse and complicated IT environments.

But the question is, what exactly is observability? why businesses should consider it in 2022? What can businesses achieve with the help of it?

What Is Observability?

In the world of IT, observability is the efficiency to measure the real-time status of systems based on the data and details it produces, including logs, metrics, and traces.

Observability depends on telemetry collected from the endpoints and services of the multi-cloud IT environments. In modern times, hardware, software, and cloud infrastructure generate records of every single activity. The purpose of having observability is to understand what is going on across all these devices and among the technologies, so IT teams can easily detect and resolve the issues to keep the systems efficient and reliable.

Many organizations use observability solutions to analyze the impact of events on their operations, understand software development life cycles, and end-user experiences.

Observability has become more essential in the last few years, as an environment based on the cloud has become more complex, and the potential threats and root causes have become more difficult to identify. As teams start gathering and working on observability data, they start recognizing its benefits to the business.

Myths About Observability

You now know what observability is. But you also should understand what it is not. Various monitoring solution providers have their definitions when it comes to observability. It could be because they make up their thoughts about observability, but it could be misleading the users in most cases. So, it is important to know the myths that are floating about observability in the market.

Observability solutions and monitoring are similar

Many people interpret observability and monitoring as the same. Well, to some extent they are the same. After all, companies need some monitoring tools to implement observability. Let us consider observability as a superset of network monitoring. Companies need to monitor their infrastructure as part of their observability best practices. They should look out for a solution that can support the overall observability needs. If that is not possible through one tool, only combining another could be the option.

Observability solution is just for software

People assume that observability is for software applications only because of the advancement in cloud infrastructure observability. But the reality is the entire network needs to be observed in detail. Collecting, distributing, and analyzing network telemetry data is extremely helpful and should be a valuable part of network performance monitoring.

Observability solution is only an internal agent

Usually, the development and operations teams have different mentalities, especially in the age of DevOps. Observability monitoring tools should not be considered as only internal agents, instead, they should be integrated into their software for more visibility.

Why Observability Is Important In 2022

To reduce MTTR and SLAs, companies need to implement observability using the appropriate tools. This strategy will lead to superior end-user experience. Another reason to observe the entire infrastructure and applications is that the modern cloud naturally limits visibility. With distributed tracing, companies can get clear visibility across various components of the infrastructure.

Another important reason to include observability is ITOps teams can view performance data and analyze the real-time data for better performance. With a clear strategy for observability in place development and operations, teams can stay on the same page.

Companies need to have observability in place because it delivers powerful advantages to IT teams and organizations. Here are some use-cases.

End-user experience

A good user experience can improve a company’s reputation and boost companies’ revenue by providing a privileged edge over the competition. By detecting and resolving issues before it comes to an end user’s notice, an organization can increase customer satisfaction and retention. It is also possible to optimize the user experience through real-time data experience.

Business analytics

Companies can combine business context with full-stack app analytics and application performance to understand the real-time impact on business, enhance conversion optimization, make sure that software releases meet anticipated goals, and confirm that the organization is following the internal and external SLAs appropriately.

Team Collaboration

Observability is rapidly becoming the standard to help teams during unavoidable circumstances when something goes wrong in the infrastructure. The reason is very clear when the entire network is observable, teams will have more confidence in handling the situation, and they can implement fixes faster whenever it is required.

Benefits of Observability

The core benefit of observability is that all the things are equally observable and easy to understand in general and in detail, quick way to monitor, and the possibility to repair is higher than a lesser observed system. More precisely, observability is the solution that directly supports the goals of DevOps/SRE/Agile and helps them deliver a higher quality of services.

Here are some other benefits;

Discover and address unknown issues

A basic monitoring tool only watches for known issues and does not look for the issues that are unknown except the IT team knows exactly what to watch for. Observability discovers hidden conditions, that no one knows about, then tracks the relationship of the issue to specific performance vulnerability. It is the ideal solution for identifying the root cause of a speedy resolution.

Facilitate automated remediation

When observability is combined with AIOps and automation capability to make predictions based on system outputs and resolve them without any human intervention. To get more detailed insights without wasting time on finger-pointing. It also strengthens the positive atmosphere among the teams and creates effective collaboration.

Conclusion

Observability opens the door to organizational improvements, innovation, and digital transformation. And most importantly, the end-users eventually get a high-quality user experience. The hype of observability is well deserved for businesses looking for higher uptime and quality performance. Observability is the solution that helps businesses overcome the complexity of modern architecture and get end-to-end visibility across the entire IT infrastructure. The ideal approach to get the right observability solution is to check out what monitoring companies need to offer and what features are included.