Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Have you ever tried to find a bug in a multi-layered architecture? Although this might sound like a simple enough task, it can quickly become a nightmare if the system doesn’t have proper monitoring. And the more distributed your system is, the more complex it becomes to analyze the root cause of a problem. That’s precisely why observability is key in distributed systems. Observability can be thought of as the advanced version of application monitoring.

Just about every organization today relies on key applications running on complex multi-cloud environments to transact business and enable users to work. It is critical to ensure that those applications are running optimally. A solid monitoring and alerting system is required to know when an issue needs attention. But having a robust monitoring system is not enough.

A reliable digital customer experience is critical to the success of digital-first businesses. Each minute of downtime can result in the loss of revenue, unsatisfied customers, and damage to reputation. However, as your uptime gets closer to 100%, it gets exponentially harder to improve and often comes at the cost of speed of innovation. A good balance between innovation (i.e., new feature releases) and maintaining an acceptable level of reliability is key to success in the digital world.

Almost every organization is going through digital transformation. According to IDC, direct digital transformation investment is growing globally at a compound annual growth rate of 15.5% and is expected to approach $6.8 trillion by 2023. Customers quickly embrace the benefits of a customer experience reshaped by technology. However, they have little patience when that technology doesn’t work as expected.

Monitoring the digital experience of users is a must-have these days. Ensuring the end clients are satisfied is difficult though. People are not keen to provide feedback; they just change the vendor without explanation. It is, therefore, crucial to build enough observability into a front-end application (a web page or a mobile UI) so it can tell the story of how well the user perceived the interaction within the application.

At this point, you already know how powerful syslog is (and if you don’t, check out “Introduction to Syslog”). But here’s the thing: Scaling your systems to consume high volume syslog is like fighting zombies. Weird unexpected behavior and no easy solutions. Before you fight zombies, though, you have to understand them. So, here are the challenges for scaling syslog one by one.

Syslog is an event logging standard that lets almost any device or application send data about status, events, diagnostics, and more. It’s commonly used by network and storage devices to ship observability data to analytics platforms and SIEMs in order to support and secure the enterprise. Syslog is an excellent lightweight protocol to get telemetry from small scale devices.

One of the most important pieces of operating any application stack is making sure you’re aware of the logging events occurring on your running systems. If your development team is like most, then you collaborate with your colleagues using Slack. Being successful while building and operating software includes looking for ways to implement high-visibility operations within your team communication platform.