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.

One of the major trends in software development in the last decade has been “shifting left” responsibilities that have traditionally been under operation’s domain to earlier in the software development life cycle (SDLC). It first came in the form of DevOps where a lot of the software engineering best practices were introduced to the deploy, operate, monitor phases. Such examples include continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

For any software company, a log monitoring tool is a must for collecting, storing, and providing a centralized view of all logs from different applications and hosts for faster anomaly detection, incident resolution, and troubleshooting. They can also help detect security threats and provide audit trails. They are effective in capacity planning, decision-making, and ensuring optimized performance.

In this article, we will use OpenTelemetry to instrument a sample Flask app for traces. Flask is one of the most popular web application frameworks of Python. It consists of Werkzeug WSGI toolkit and Jinja2 template engine. Instrumentation is the biggest challenge engineering teams face when starting out with monitoring their application performance. OpenTelemetry is the leading open-source standard that is solving the problem of instrumentation.

Falcon is a minimalist Python web API framework for building robust applications and microservices. It also compliments many other Python frameworks by providing extra reliability, flexibility, and performance. Using OpenTelemetry, you can monitor your Falcon applications for performance by collecting telemetry signals like traces. Instrumentation is the biggest challenge engineering teams face when starting out with monitoring their application performance.

Elastic APM for native apps provides auto-instrumentation of outgoing HTTP requests and view-loads, captures custom events, errors, and crashes, and includes pre-built dashboards for data analysis and troubleshooting purposes Elastic® APM for iOS and Android native apps is generally available in the stack release v8.12. The Elastic iOS and Android APM agents are open-source and have been developed on-top, i.e., as a distribution of the OpenTelemetry Swift and Android SDK/API, respectively.

Are you looking for a Dynatrace alternative? Then you have come to the right place. In this article, we will go through the top 9 Dynatrace alternatives. First, let's briefly discuss what Dynatrace offers and why you might consider other solutions. Dynatrace is a leading observability and application performance management (APM) platform, providing deep insights into application performance and reliability.