The latest News and Information on Observabilty for complex systems and related technologies.
Salesforce was the first of many SaaS-based companies to succeed and see massive growth. Since they first started out in 1999, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools have taken the IT sector and, well the world, by storm. For one, they mitigate bloatware by moving applications from the client’s computer to the cloud. Plus, the sheer ease of use brought by cloud-based, plug-and-play software solutions has transformed all sorts of sectors.
Observability is a buzzword right now. Rightly so, as many companies are greatly concerned about what’s happening with their systems. Every company has become a software company and if they aren’t, they are being disrupted by one. IT leaders have more weight on their shoulders than ever before and it’s because digitization is rapidly changing the way people consume nearly everything.
Observability is the key to solving problems quickly, and organizations use many tools to try to increase visibility in their environments so they don’t miss anything. Typical sources of observability include metrics, logs, and traces. The foundation of monitoring, metrics are predictable counts or measurements that are aggregated over a specific period of time. Timestamped records of discrete events that can store outputs from applications, systems, and services.
Today’s software is incredibly complicated and creates tons of data. Metrics, logs, and traces are generated constantly by hundreds of services for even simple applications. Every transaction can generate on the order of kilobytes of metadata about the transaction — and multiplying that to account for even a small amount of concurrency can create a few megabytes a second (or ~300GB/day) of data that needs to be captured and analyzed for later use.
Observability, which originated from control theory, measures how well you can understand a system’s internal states from its external outputs. Observability uses instrumentation to provide insights that aid monitoring. In DevOps, gaining observability is achieved through a set of monitoring solutions. The shift to use one vendor platform to do so, versus multiple solutions, make sense as.
I’m excited to announce that ServiceNow has signed an agreement to acquire next-generation observability leader Lightstep. Combining Lightstep’s innovative observability capabilities with ServiceNow’s unmatched Now Platform will help customers better manage software complexity, reliability, and performance while enabling the enterprise workflows that deliver great experiences.
