A smooth environment requires observability, especially if you have cross—functional teams and a highly distributed computing environment. In fact, observability enhances critical daily IT operations, including:
Accurate debugging: Use data from events, metrics, logs, traces, and other available sources to quickly identify and resolve issues.
Proactive detection: Detect issues before they cause problems by identifying trends and understanding system behavior.
Improved efficiency: Gain insights into how you can improve a system and make changes accordingly.
Broader coverage of multiple cloud-native architectures: Gain a holistic view across multiple cloud-native architectures.
Observability has broad-reaching applications—from optimizing web transactions to ensuring that IT performance meets customer expectations. Here’s a use case that highlights its value:
Let’s say you're a developer trying to identify the cause of a system crash. With monitoring, you would have to make sure all relevant systems had been monitored, manually collect data from them, and then try to piece together what happened. This process would be difficult and time consuming because your data would be from after the crash occurred.
With observability, you would have automatic access to data from all available sources. You would also have the help of analytics to find anomalies that could point you to the problem before it crashes the system.