The topic of continuous profiling has been an ongoing discussion in the observability world for some time. I said back in 2021 that profiling was set to be the next major telemetry signal in observability, and in fact, since then there’s been growing interest in profiles. Startups and large observability vendors have gotten into this domain. A significant recent step was when the OpenTelemetry project decided to add profiles to its core signals and formalized the open unified specification for that.

In this post, we’ll embark on the journey of building a simple PHP single-page application that interacts with a MySQL database. We’ll integrate logging functionality on top of our application. Logging is a crucial aspect of any application—for providing insights into user behavior, tracking errors, and monitoring performance. We’ll start by walking through how to set up our application.

Kubernetes has changed the way many organizations approach the deployment of their applications. But despite its benefits, the additional layers of abstraction and reams of data can cause complexity around Kubernetes monitoring. We’ve seen so much of these challenges borne out in the results of the 2024 Observability Pulse survey. In the survey report, 36% of respondents say Kubernetes poses a challenge, and just 10% of organizations say they have full observability into their environments.

Amazon CloudWatch Logs enables you to centralize the logs from different AWS services, logs from your applications running in AWS and on-prem servers, using a single highly scalable service. You can then easily view these logs data, search them for specific error codes or patterns, filter them based on specific fields, or archive them securely for future analysis.

Elastic Search 8.13 extends the capabilities that enable developers to use artificial intelligence and machine learning models to create fast and elevated search experiences. Integrated with Apache Lucene 9.10, measured vector search performance has exceeded 2x in benchmarks, extending the sophistication of searches that can be performed in near real time.

There is observation then there’s analysis. Log Analytics falls under the latter category. Observation and analysis are not mutually exclusive; one builds upon the other. Similarly, Log analytics advances beyond simple log monitoring, enabling observability teams to identify trends and irregularities throughout your enterprise. To demystify what is Log Analytics, let’s first have a look at the definition.