Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

May 2024

Why the Early Results of Observability Deployments Look So Promising

Editor’s Note: This is the second installment of a series of blog posts previewing our State of Observability 2024 survey report. In the first episode of this blog series, we looked at where IT organizations are in their observability journeys and found, rather surprisingly, that most enterprise IT organizations and MSPs were just getting started in observability. Yet 96% of respondents told us their observability solution was delivering the value they expected.

5 Top Kubernetes Observability Challenges and Solutions

Observability in IT refers to the ability to measure a system's internal functioning by studying its signals from the outside. Modern IT observability is achieved through three kinds of telemetry: metrics, traces, and logs. Metrics aggregate events to gauge a system’s current state. Tracing tracks the progress of each transaction to not only measure performance but also debug the problem. On the other hand, logs record each event, which can help during troubleshooting.

Tackling the Unsustainable Skills Challenge in Cybersecurity and Observability

This is the third and final post in a series of blog posts about the disconnect between modern IT and security teams and the vendors they’re forced to work with. If you’re looking for the first and second posts, you can find them here and here.

The Future of Observability: High-Performance Observability at Edge and Beyond with Rust

Join Prabhat Sharma, founder of Open Observe, as he delves into the realm of high-performance observability. Learn about the challenges faced by cloud workloads and explore innovative solutions to enhance observability at the edge, in servers, and across cloud environments. Prabhat shares his journey from addressing persistent problems with existing solutions to building Open Observe, an open-source platform revolutionizing logs, metrics, traces, and dashboards. Gain valuable insights into the power of Apache Arrow Data Fusion in optimizing data storage and analytics performance.

False Positive Alerts: A Hidden Risk in Observability

Observability systems are designed to keep tabs on key metrics, identify unusual patterns, and alert teams when things go awry. Despite best efforts, however, these systems are not infallible, and sometimes they send out alerts for issues that don’t exist. This is what we call a false positive. These false alarms can wreak havoc on team efficiency, lead to alert fatigue, and obscure genuine problems. Let’s delve into what false positives are and why they matter so much.

How Can OpenTelemetry Transform Your Cloud Native Observability Strategy? Insights from Sudhir Singh

Join Sudhir Singh, co-founder and COO of Cloud Builders, as he delves into the essentials of observability in the cloud-native landscape. In this session, Sudhir explores the advantages of implementing OpenTelemetry over traditional monitoring tools and vendor-specific solutions. Discover why OpenTelemetry is crucial for gaining comprehensive insights into your applications and infrastructure, learn about its role in enhancing system health monitoring, and understand its impact on mitigating potential incidents before they escalate.

Empowering Engineering Excellence: Achieving a 26% Reduction in On-call Pages at Amperity with Modern Observability for Logs

Amperity required an observability partner to facilitate their transition into the modern engineering era as their previous tooling struggled to support their growth strategy. When customer data is scattered everywhere, how do you put the pieces together to get an accurate customer 360° view? That’s the power of Amperity’s customer data platform (CDP), and the company has been driving customer data innovation for nearly a decade.

Modern Observability 101

In technology, having “modern” capabilities is standard. Staying ahead of the curve is critical, and keeping outdated technology or processes going can be a recipe for disaster in a complex, ever-changing landscape. Ensuring the smooth functioning and performance of software systems is paramount. This is where modern observability—a sophisticated approach to monitoring and understanding the inner workings of applications and infrastructure—is required.

The Cost Crisis in Metrics Tooling

In my February 2024 piece The Cost Crisis in Observability Tooling, I explained why the cost of tools built atop the three pillars of metrics, logs, and traces—observability 1.0 tooling—is not only soaring at a rate many times higher than your traffic increases, but has also become radically disconnected from the value those tools can deliver. Too often, as costs go up, the value you derive from these tools declines.

How to Unify Your Application and Infrastructure Observability With Grafana and Beyla

In this video, learn how Grafana simplifies observability with our Application Observability solution, streamlining monitoring for distributed systems. See how we leverage OpenTelemetry and Prometheus to minimize mean time to resolution for complex application challenges. With a commitment to open-source protocols, you can empower your team to own their data and navigate system complexities with confidence. Delve into Grafana's architecture to unlock the full potential of observability in your systems.

How MSPs Can Maximize Network Observability: 3 Keys to Success

In today’s increasingly dynamic digital world, the need for end-to-end network visibility has never been more critical. These requirements are especially profound for managed service providers (MSPs) and communications service providers (CSPs). MSPs and CSPs find themselves at the epicenter of digital transformation.

Enrich your IT ecosystem with data-driven insights from integrations with Site24x7 observability

In today's digital world, websites and applications are the lifeblood of your business. But ensuring their performance and uptime in a complex IT landscape, with its mix of technologies and systems, is a constant challenge. Imagine a sale overwhelming your online store, causing the website to slow down and frustrated customers to abandon carts. Downtime like this isn't just lost sales; it damages your reputation and hinders innovation as IT teams scramble to fix issues instead of building new features.

Observability vs. Monitoring: Differences Explained

People often get confused between Monitoring and Observability and use them interchangeably in the DevOps field. But they are two very unique concepts. Since we work in this sphere, I thought it was ideal to clear up this confusion and give you the right information on it. With most of the application software now adopting several microservices and going for distributed architecture, the need to have a complete overview of your system cannot be understated.

How to Achieve Observability as Code with Grafana | LiveRamp at ObservabilityCON on the Road 2024

Leveraging Terraform alongside Grafana, Kubernetes, and Helm providers, the SRE team at LiveRamp has transformed every aspect of their operational toolkit. From agent installations and synthetic checks to Grafana k6 performance testing, notification policies, contact points, and alerts into modular, code-based components, the team is crafting a cutting-edge observability solution powered by Grafana Cloud. Learn how this seamless integration ensures a robust, scalable, and easily manageable infrastructure that is setting new benchmarks for system reliability and efficiency around the business.

Reducing MTTR with the Elastic Observability AI Assistant

In this quick overview, discover how the Elastic Observability AI Assistant can streamline your operations and significantly reduce Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR). In just a minute or two, we'll highlight the key features and benefits of integrating AI into your observability strategy. Perfect for IT professionals and SREs who are looking for an efficient solution to improve system uptime and performance. Watch now to learn how AI can make a real difference in your response times!

Performance Optimization with Elastic Observability

Welcome to our quick overview of Performance Optimization with Elastic Observability! In this video, we explore the basics of how Elastic Observability can enhance your system’s performance monitoring and management. Discover key features that help you keep your applications running smoothly and efficiently, without deep diving into complexities. Perfect for anyone looking to get a quick grasp of what Elastic Observability can offer.

Incident Management and Troubleshooting with Elastic Observability

Welcome to our quick guide on enhancing your incident management and troubleshooting capabilities using Elastic Observability. In this brief overview, we'll highlight how Elastic Observability can streamline your operations and help you quickly pinpoint and resolve issues. Whether you're looking to improve your response times or just want a snapshot of what Elastic can offer, this video is the perfect starting point.

Finding unknown/unknowns in logs for SREs with Elastic Observability

Welcome to a quick overview of how Elastic Observability can help SREs tackle the elusive unknown/unknowns in their system logs. In just a minute or two, this video will introduce you to the basic strategies and tools that Elastic provides to enhance your site reliability through smarter data insights. Perfect for professionals looking to quick-start their monitoring capabilities without getting overwhelmed. Dive in and discover how to transform your logs into actionable insights!

Custom Alerts, SLOs, and Anomaly Detection with Elastic Observability

In this overview, we'll introduce you to the key features of Elastic Observability, focusing on custom alerts, service level objectives (SLOs), and anomaly detection. Whether you're managing infrastructure, ensuring service reliability, or overseeing software performance, these tools are essential for maintaining system health and efficiency. This video provides a quick glimpse into how Elastic Observability can streamline your monitoring tasks and alert you to issues before they impact your services. Perfect for those looking to enhance their observability strategy.

Developers Call for Full-Stack Observability as Pressure Mounts to Accelerate Release Velocity and Deliver Seamless and Secure Digital Experiences

Cisco has unveiled findings from a survey that details how software developers are spending more than 57% of their time being dragged into 'war rooms' to solve application performance issues, rather than investing their time developing new, cutting-edge software applications as part of their organisation's innovation strategy.

Observability, Telemetry, and Monitoring: Learn About the Differences

Over the past five years, software and systems have become increasingly complex and challenging for teams to understand. A challenging macroeconomic environment, the rise of generative AI, and further advancements in cloud computing compound the problems faced by many organizations. Simply understanding what’s broken is difficult enough, but trying to do so while balancing the need to constantly innovate and ship makes the problem worse.

Does Your Observability Practice Lack Maturity? Here's What to Do.

Observability isn’t new. But organizations are struggling to adopt mature observability practices, and the impact on business is palpable. Organizations are seeing the value of observability for their applications and infrastructure—the results of our 2024 Observability Pulse survey of 500 global IT professionals reflects that across the board.

Monitoring vs Observability: What is Reality?

Before we start, I have a confession: I absolutely love Digg (people are still Digging things, right?) errr...Reddit. It actually is my front page to the internet, where I research upgrades for my home lab/VR/other niche hobbies, watch silly videos, ingest low-effort memes, judge if people are ‘AHs’ or not on /r/amitheasshole, and occasionally talk trash to other Redditors about my Michigan-based sports teams.

Latest Top 11 Observability Tools in Spotlight - 2024's Guide

In microservices architecture, observability tools enable you to create central dashboards to gauge the health of your distributed systems. New age observability tools have shifted to providing quick workflows to debug application issues. In this post we will explore top 11 observability tools that you can consider to use for your software systems. In today's digital economy, distributed architectures have become the norm.

Logs with Firehose: Stream logs to the AWS Observability app cheaper and easier

AWS is an essential part of many organizations’ tech stacks today, which is why we continue to make it easier to observe your environment in Grafana Cloud. We recently launched AWS Observability, a fully managed application for visualizing and alerting on dozens of AWS offerings. And with our latest update, we’re making it cheaper and simpler to ingest and query your AWS logs.

How to Use Relational Fields: Some Nifty Use Cases

We recently introduced relational fields, a new feature that allows you to query spans based on their relationship to each other within a trace. You can now query for spans where its root span, direct parent span, or any other single span in the trace has certain attributes. We currently support the following three prefixes: root. - Identifies the root span within a trace. To find a match, any additional root. filters in your query will search through fields only in the specified root. span.

The Art of Visibility: Constructing an OpenTelemetry Observability Pipeline

Craft an observability pipeline that offers unparalleled insights into your systems and applications. Watch as we explore the art of constructing an OpenTelemetry observability pipeline, from instrumenting your codebase to effectively analyzing and visualizing telemetry data. Whether you're aiming to enhance troubleshooting, optimize performance, or gain a deeper understanding of your environment, this video series will equip you with the knowledge and tools to elevate your observability game.

Rocking the Logs: Fender's Journey to Modern Observability

Fender faced challenges with log analysis, finding it slow and complex to navigate, leading to inefficient troubleshooting and a need for a more user-friendly and modern observability solution. Synonymous with all things rock n’ roll, Fender is the world’s leading guitar manufacturer. To enhance the customer experience, Fender launched their digital apps in 2016 (Fender Tune and Fender Tone) and 2017 (Fender Play) to empower customers in starting and advancing their guitar playing skills.

Why an Observability Pipeline is a Must Have for Security

Security is paramount for almost any sized organization. With the rapid pace of technological advancements and the increasing reliance on digital infrastructure, organizations face an ever-evolving landscape of cyber threats and risks. Protecting sensitive data, intellectual property, and customer information is no longer optional; it is a critical component of maintaining trust and credibility in the marketplace.

SolarWinds Observability simplifies searching live event messages and log archives

New reverse tail UI, API-based searches, and copy-paste permalinks Searching event data in SolarWinds® Observability just got easier. A new reverse tail display option lets you move the log search bar and change the scroll of the events from bottom to top. For SolarWinds Papertrail™ fans, moving the search bar and changing the scroll will make you feel right at home. To access this customization feature, select display options and toggle the reverse tail option.

Network Observability from HPE OpsRamp

Proactively manage and address network challenges, reduce downtime and enhance overall operational efficiency. OpsRamp, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, provides a comprehensive IT operations management platform that includes powerful network observability capabilities to ensure the performance, reliability, and security of network infrastructure.

Getting started with the Elastic AI Assistant for Observability and Amazon Bedrock

Elastic recently released version 8.13, which includes the general availability of Amazon Bedrock integration for the Elastic AI Assistant for Observability. This blog post will walk through the step-by-step process of setting up the Elastic AI Assistant with Amazon Bedrock.

360° Observability Strategy Webinar

Catch our on-demand webinar, "360° Observability Strategy: Enhancing Reliability Across the Board," featuring Andreas Prins, CEO of StackState, and Meriem Ahmed. Originally held to guide IT professionals through the complexities of observability in today's diverse tech environments, this session is now available for you to access anytime.

Pipeline Talk: Between Two Fernders Edition

Cribl’s co-founders, Clint Sharp, Dritan Bitincka, and Ledion Bitincka, recently took time to host a Between two Fernders edition of Pipeline Talk at the Cribl offices to discuss a wide variety of topics, including Cribl Lake, the N-Gage, WWE aspirations, fishing poles, how CAT6 cabling is not named after actual cats, and wondering if Apple’s iPhone will be a consumer hit (Yes, we know what year it is, but the host clearly doesn’t).

Introducing Honeycomb for Frontend Observability: Get the Data You Need for Actionable Customer Experience Improvements

Today, we're announcing the early access program of Honeycomb for Frontend Observability. Honeycomb for Frontend Observability gives teams the ability to quickly identify opportunities for optimization within their web app. This starts with better OpenTelemetry instrumentation, available as an NPM package, that lets you instrument and collect attribution data on Core Web Vitals in under an hour.