Key benefits of observability

The first step toward implementing observability is not just knowing application design, infrastructure, and business functions – it’s also about considering customer behavior, the impact of incidents, application performance, adoption in the market, and the dollar value, to name a few. All members of the team need to come together to implement observability.

From the inception stage, you will require inputs from architects for design, developers for putting it together, operations for ensuring the right alert triggers, the business for clearly defining what they need, and a strategy to assess customer behavior and impact. As the project proceeds in the development and testing phases, continue to assess measures that help establish the success of a business function. Ensure that those measures are captured in outputs (logs/metrics/traces). Ensure that applications are not seen in silos but can be correlated as per business functions. This will give you visibility into business metrics and their impact on customers when things go south. The responsibility of knowing the fine-grained details of the app is shifted from architects and business analysts to every member of the team.

By now, if you have gathered that observability requires planning and hard work to implement, then you are on the right path! Congratulations, you have achieved your first milestone in your observability journey. It’s not something that you think about at the end of the project so that you can tick a box before it’s released into production. You need to think of observability from the inception of your new projects, plan for it and reframe the perspective for existing projects, and replan your observability strategy. We will talk about this a lot throughout this book. After all, this book has been purposely written to help you plan for observability.

The picture we have painted in this chapter is completely achievable. But what do you get after implementing observability for your applications?

• Correlated applications that deliver higher business value

Modern architectures are delivered with crippling complexity, sophisticated infrastructure, smart networks, and an intertwined web of applications. A transaction originating in an on-premises web application may end up traversing containerized applications hosted in the cloud before it reaches completion. Observability lets you embrace this complexity as it focuses on correlating applications. Breaks or slowness in any application will quickly map out the impact on other applications, business functions, and customers. If your applications are observable, you will observe that the conversation in war rooms will change from bringing up the application to restoring business functions and minimizing customer impact.

• An improved customer experience that drives customer loyalty

Observability delivers information faster. A high-severity incident may be super critical for infrastructure but if that particular infrastructure is only serving a very small percentage of low-value customers, it is not a high-priority incident. Observability gives you this information. It also tells you the symptoms before the customers sense them, giving you a thin window to analyze, detect, and act. Sometimes, the issues can’t be fixed in this thin window, but you can still use the time to prepare your response to the customers so that social media doesn’t explode and the service desk responds coherently. All your investments in observability are bound to result in improved customer experience.

• Tools rationalization for improved ROI

Cut down the time required in interacting with various teams to identify the epicenter of the problem by integrating available tools that provide relevant insights for your application. Allow the tools to work in their own space but integrate the important metrics (infrastructure, application processes, deployments, database, networks, SRE, business, capacity, and more) from all the tools into a single tool that can easily construct and deconstruct your application, enabling you to measure performance on good days and manage incidents. A single or set of carefully chosen tools for observing business functions will also increase the transparency in the team as every single member of the team will have access to the same level of insights. Modern applications can generate a ton of data at high velocity. Observability helps in optimizing the data generation and collection mechanism to improve reliability and reduce cost by managing big data problems.

• Focus on not just tech but also the process

To get the data you need, don’t just look at writing the enterprise-grade application code. You should also invest in the process so that the problem’s remediation is part of the system design. Automate all repetitive tasks along the way. It will give your team agility and reduce the room for human error. Choosing the best tool and technology will only pay off if it opens up the visibility of your system. It’s not always possible to achieve 100% automation, so introduce robust practices that provide enough checkpoints to trace a problem, such as Git commits and peer reviews. Writing code can’t be fully automated, but introducing Git builds a strong process around the manual task that gives end-to-end visibility into what has been deployed on the servers.

• Data noise is converted into actionable insights

Correlating applications, consolidating different tools, and ingesting telemetry data can easily lead to large volumes of data, often referred to as data noise. Your observability design may be capturing thousands of parameters; what brings value is knowing which measures are central to delivering a particular business function. In observable systems, post-incident analysis is more fruitful as all the parties involved have access to information from all other teams that are involved. There is no place for playing the blame game or meddling with the information that was available only in silos earlier. Just imagine the magic observability would bring to MTTR with all its correlated systems and the involvement of different perspectives. Observable systems will allow you to take a head-on approach for the busiest days of the year as every aspect of the system is being watched and the slightest of slip-ups can be easily identified and assessed for impact. It empowers the decision-makers.

• Foundation for a self-healing architecture

In a complex and interconnected IT system environment, a self-healing architecture can help in guaranteeing the service’s health by quickly identifying an outage in a component or a situation that can cause an outage, and then deploying countermeasures to prevent the issue from happening or resolving the issue quickly to reduce the impact on the end customer. As you may have noticed, identifying a problem or a potential problem is a critical part of the self-healing architecture. For the self-healing actions to be effective, the detection of the problems has to be as close to real time as possible, and they must be effective and comprehensive. This is where the need for observability comes in – to be able to monitor the health of an application at the OS, application, and user experience levels.

Along with the benefits outlined in this section, observability brings many intangible benefits, such as a focus on creating service maps, strengthening CMDB, a change in the mindset of developers, and supporting people. It brings about not just a technical shift but also a cultural one. However, you can use these benefits to pitch for your observability journey. Also, keep these benefits in mind while designing observability so that you build a quality observability mechanism in the first iteration.