Observability tools allow teams to process massive amounts of data without tedious manual efforts or inefficient systems. Observability platforms solve issues and determine root causes before they impact customer experience and revenue. Its potential use cases vary depending on the area of the organization, from development and IT operations to the C suite.
Monitor and respond to system performance
Debugging and application performance are primary use cases for observability. It can help you answer questions about the health of your services and systems overall. Observability in DevOps can monitor the average response time for a given operation and discover what’s causing certain users to experience longer load times. It can also inform you what services need tuning or how a change might have created latency or impacted application performance. It also gives you reports on the fundamentals of your user experience and how your SLOs are measuring up.
Increase business performance and improve productivity
Connecting business and operational data can greatly improve business performance. ​​Combining the two offers complete visibility, letting you approach complex systems holistically. With more efficient operations, your teams can quickly address potential issues when they come up and spend more time on other parts of the business. Better visibility and more streamlined processes leads to more revenue and increased productivity.
Enable digital and cloud transformation
As companies move to application modernization and cloud infrastructure, observability gives them a birds-eye view of all the moving parts. Keeping systems up-and-running during migration is complex. Full-stack observability is necessary to ensure your systems run reliably during and after the cloud migration process.
Microservice architectures add even more complexity. Because they are independently deployable across different hosts, they help make applications more scalable and easier to maintain. But, it’s crucial to keep track of updates, errors, and failures in a microservice architecture. Observability can give you full visibility into dependencies in a dynamic system. For example:
Food for thought AH Tech adopted an observability platform for the Ahold Delhaize food group. It lets them track individual items through every stage of the order fulfillment chain. They are able to observe real-time data for their entire process, down to the price of a unit across 13,000 points of sale. IT teams now have insight into issues before individual stores can report them.
Incredible views The rapid growth of the French travel site Oui.sncf led to multiple silos that impeded their user experience, threatening revenue. Observability was the solution. Once they adopted an observability platform, departments were able to connect all operational data. Ticket revenue, time to purchase, and abandoned carts were able to be analyzed by region. Dashboard capabilities made troubleshooting easier, allowing teams to respond to events in real time, reducing incident resolution from hours to minutes.