Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The concept of observability centers around collecting data from all parts of the system to provide a unified view of the software at large. Fault tolerance, no single point of failure and redundancy are prominent design principles in modern software systems. But that doesn’t mean errors, degradation, bugs or even the occasional catastrophe don’t happen.

Martin and Jess recently conversed with Todd Gardner of RequestMetrics as part of the O11ycast podcast. We don’t normally write blogs based on these conversations, but there were impactful comments in that episode that bear repeating. You can listen to the full conversation if you wish. Let’s get into it!

Adding additional attributes to your telemetry not only provides valuable context to your observability pipeline but also enhances the flexibility and precision of your data operations. Consider, for example, the need to route data from specific geographical locations, like the EU, to a designated destination. With a ‘Location’ attribute added to your logs, you can seamlessly achieve this.

Administrators and IT management are increasingly leveraging simple quantifiable KPI indicators such as “Performance Ratings” to gain rapid overviews and track key outcomes. Modern IT architectures are designed and built to scale and be resilient. Systems are now usually built to handle failover and auto-scale up and down to handle varying demand and workloads with very different properties and needs.

In a simple deployment, an application will emit spans, metrics, and logs which will be sent to api.honeycomb.io and show up in charts. This works for small projects and organizations that do not control outbound access from their servers. If your organization has more components, network rules, or requires tail-based sampling, you’ll need to create a telemetry pipeline.

An observability strategy helps many businesses support the stability and performance of complex, distributed IT environments. Since you may already be tracking the three pillars of observability—metrics, logs, and traces—why shouldn’t you also use the endless stream of telemetry data to identify security risks and vulnerabilities, just as you use it to monitor and stabilize operations? Even the best-planned observability strategy is incomplete without the fourth pillar of security.

When people hear the word “migration,” they typically think about migrating from on-prem to the cloud. In reality, companies do migrations of varying types and sizes all the time. However, many teams delay making critical migrations or technical upgrades because they don’t have the proper tools and frameworks to de-risk the process.