Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

What’s the ultimate goal of bringing observability into an organization? Is it just to chase down things when they’re broken and not working? Or can it be used to truly enable developers to innovate faster? That’s a topic I recently discussed with David Ostrovsky, a software engineer at Meta, the parent company of social media networks Facebook and Instagram among others. He was my guest on the most recent episode of the OpenObservability Talks podcast.

Distributed architectures are becoming an increasingly important source of application services for organizations. Advances in observability and monitoring are being driven by this trend. But exactly how do observability and monitoring differ from one another? It's essential to know when something goes wrong in the application delivery chain so you can identify the root cause and resolve it before it has an impact on your business. Monitoring and observability offer a two-pronged strategy.

As you adopt modern, serverless, microservices-based architectures, it can become more challenging to monitor and understand the state of your applications at any given time. That’s where event bus capabilities from services like Amazon EventBridge can come in handy. AWS EventBridge can help you build loosely coupled, event-driven architectures and applications, and deploy new features faster.

The transition to distributed applications is in full swing, driven mainly by our need to be “always-on” as consumers and fast-paced businesses. That need is driving deployments to have more complex requirements along with the ability to be globally diverse and rapidly innovate.

Mission-critical apps that are deployed on the cloud drive today's modern enterprises, which in turn power their businesses. These applications' fundamental units are microservices, which tiny development teams created to enable speedy feature releases to the market. APIs serve as the ties that bring these microservices together so they can cooperate.

Over the past twenty years I have been working in tech, I have seen a variety of products and solutions come and go. For many, it is because they overly complicate something that should’ve been simple. With SolarWinds, I am thrilled to work with solutions designed from the start to be simple for our customers to use. We focus on providing solutions built to integrate with other elements of your network and complement them, so they become more effective.

The gaming industry is an extensive software market segment, reaching over $225 billion US in 2022. This staggering number represents gaming software sales to users with high expectations of game releases. User acquisition takes up a large part of software budgets, with $14.5 billion US spending globally in 2021. User retention is critical to the success of any game, especially where monetization requires driving in-app purchases and ad revenue.

California-based Medallia captures feedback signals — in-person interactions, customer surveys, call centers, social media, etc. — to help businesses improve their customer experience. In much the same way, the company’s Performance and Observability Engineering team captures observability signals to optimize the experience for internal users.

The traditional approach for searching observability data is a tried-and-true: Once all the search staging is accomplished, we can perform high-speed, high-performance, deep-dive analysis of the data. But is this the best way or even the only way to search all that observability data? The answer to the first question is maybe, as it depends on what you are trying to accomplish. The answer to the second question must be a resounding no.