With countless observability tools, data sources, and environments to juggle, the organizations that deploy and manage today’s distributed applications often face an uphill battle to gain visibility into their application performance. That was a key takeaway from the Grafana Labs Observability Survey 2023, which incorporated input from more than 250 industry practitioners who are all too familiar with these complexities.

Observability is a term that has been thrown around a lot in the past few years in the software development industry. Different people use it in different ways, but one thing that is clear is that it attempts to provide a solution to a real pain engineers are feeling. It is the pain of not knowing what is happening in the microservices architecture and how and why systems are behaving in production.

At KubeCon Europe, it was announced that Elastic Common Schema (ECS) has been accepted by OpenTelemetry (OTel) as a contribution to the project. The goal is to achieve convergence of ECS and OpenTelemetry’s Semantic Conventions (SemConv) into a single open schema that is maintained by OpenTelemetry. This FAQ details Elastic’s contribution of Elastic Common Schema to OpenTelemetry, how it will help drive the industry to a common schema, and its impact on observability and security.

At Lightstep, we’ve seen many organizations grapple with “cloud-native sticker shock” as they come to understand that these complex systems require sifting through massive amounts of data across architectures and proprietary solutions. In today’s macroeconomic environment, organizations are looking to reduce costs while driving innovation, especially when it comes to cloud-native applications.

Metrics, Logs and Traces are often referred to as The Three Pillars of “Observability“. The term observability has been used in control theory to refer to how the state of a system can be inferred from the system’s external outputs. Applied to IT, observability is how the current state of an application can be assessed based on the data it generates. Applications and the IT components they use provide outputs in the form of metrics, events, logs and traces (MELT).

Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) has now become the de-facto standard for all engineering teams seeking to keep pace with the demands of the modern economy. At Coralogix, we operate some of the most advanced build and deploy pipelines in the world. We’ve baked that knowledge into our platform with a CI/CD Observability feature called Coralogix Tagging.

Refinery, Honeycomb’s tail-based dynamic sampling proxy, often makes sampling feel like magic. This applies especially to dynamic sampling, because it ensures that interesting and unique traffic is kept, while tossing out nearly-identical “boring” traffic. But like any sufficiently advanced technology, it can feel a bit counterintuitive to wield correctly, at first. On Honeycomb’s Customer Architect team, we’re often asked to assist customers with their Refinery clusters.

Observability originated in the field of engineering and has recently gained popularity in the world of software development. Put simply, observability refers to the ability to understand the internal state of a system based on its external outputs. IBM defines it as follows: As systems have become more complex, often including remote elements in cloud-based systems, management of the systems and troubleshooting faults and downtime have also become more complex.