Applied Observability
Paul A. Esteves - CSPO , CSM, PMP
OPEN FOR WORK, Trusted Advisor, Strategic Intelligent Enterprise, Experience Economy. Digital Transformation, Azure Cloud
Hello to my LinkedIn network and groups. It’s been a while since I’ve written anything significant here and I plan to return to the trend. I’ve spoken about future technologies, the need for digital change, particularly the need for digital onboarding, and continuous IT learning with colleagues and clients, and a personal vision that all adults will be IT literate soon. My interest in keeping track of technology and writing, but no publishing yet, of future technologies took a deeper meaning and action for me when a friend of mine at Gartner recommended that I subscribe to Gartner reports particularly the Top Tech Trends published each year. A few years ago, after Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT were introduced, I learned some #promptengineering and took the large language models #LLMs to discover the deeper fundamentals of a few of these new Gartner reported Top Tech Trends.??
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Today I want to talk about #Observability, this first came up in Gartner’s 2022 Tech of the future. This along with 9 other disruptors were identified as technology drivers for a successful #digitaltransformation. I will discuss the others in their own threads. More specifically I want to talk about??
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#Appliedobservability is a concept that refers to the practice of actively monitoring and understanding the behavior and performance of complex systems in real-time. It involves the collection, analysis, and visualization of data from various sources within a system to gain insights into its internal workings and overall health.?
Observability is particularly important in modern software systems, which are often distributed, scalable, and composed of multiple interconnected components. These systems can be challenging to understand and debug when issues arise, making observability a crucial aspect of managing and maintaining their performance and reliability.?
Applied observability is the applied use of observable, insightful data in a highly orchestrated and integrated approach across business units, functions, applications, infrastructure and operations teams.?
Applied observability is about clarity rather than creativity as it is based on confirmed stakeholder actions, rather than intentions. Even if we don’t know what the decision was, or if it was implemented differently than what we planned, we can see the actual outcomes in data.?
“Applied Observability” is an organizational continuous improvement solution that enables shortening the time between stakeholder actions and organizational reactions, in a highly orchestrated digital evolutionary journey.?
By providing leadership with our solution outcomes enabling them with:?
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Improved System Understanding:??
Observability provides deep insights into how your system behaves, its performance, and interactions between its components. Understanding these dynamics helps developers, operators, and teams make informed decisions about system architecture, resource allocation, and performance optimizations.?
Data-Driven Decision Making: ?
Observability provides valuable data for making data-driven decisions related to product development, infrastructure management, and business strategies. It helps align technical decisions with business objectives.?
OKR & KPI Management:
Observability allows them to track and meet SLA commitments, ensuring high service availability and performance. Start by defining the objectives and goals of your observability initiative. Determine what aspects of your system you want to monitor, what metrics are crucial for your application's performance, and what issues you want to proactively address.?
Identify the key metrics and observability data that align with your defined objectives. This can include response time, error rates, latency, throughput, resource usage, and other relevant performance indicators.?
Capacity Planning and Scalability:??
Understanding resource utilization and performance patterns helps in effective capacity planning. Observability data can inform decisions on scaling your system to accommodate increasing user demands and optimize resource allocation.?
Read more on my website.
Improved User Experience:??
By monitoring user-centric metrics like response time and error rates, you can ensure that your application meets user expectations and provides a smooth user experience.?
Read more on my website.
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Faster Troubleshooting and Issue Resolution: ?
When issues occur, observability allows teams to quickly identify and diagnose the root causes. Having access to real-time data and historical context enables faster incident response, reducing downtime and minimizing the impact on users. Having access to real-time data and historical context enables faster incident response, reducing downtime and minimizing the impact on users.
?Read more on my website.
Support for Continuous Deployment:??
As organizations embrace continuous deployment and agile practices, observability becomes essential to validate new releases and rapidly detect regressions or performance issues.?
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Better Collaboration and Communication:??
Observability promotes better collaboration between development and operations teams. When everyone has access to the same monitoring data and dashboards, communication is more transparent, and teams can work together more effectively.?
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Compliance and Security:??
Observability aids in meeting regulatory compliance requirements and enhances the ability to detect and respond to security threats and vulnerabilities.?
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Cost Optimization:??
By understanding resource usage patterns, observability can help optimize costs by identifying areas of inefficiency or waste in your infrastructure.?
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Proactive Issue Prevention: ?
Observability allows you to detect and address potential problems before they escalate into critical issues. By setting up proactive alerting and monitoring critical thresholds, you can take preventive measures to avoid service disruptions.?
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Open Telemetry: ?
Organizations getting started with OpenTelemetry may begin by sending data directly to an observability backend. Using the OpenTelemetry collector as part of your observability architecture provides numerous benefits and is recommended for any production deployment.
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Overall, applied observability is a foundational practice for modern systems and software development. It promotes a proactive, data-driven approach to system management, leading to better user experiences, improved system reliability, and more efficient operations.?
Providing e.g. a single interactive Observability dashboard, where the stakeholders are enabled with data-driven decisions. By applying observability systematically, organizations can increase their speed to respond and optimize business operations in real-time.?
Technology enablers that allow organizations to observe at scale include Monitoring, Instrumentation, Visualization, Analysis & Analytics, Alert mgt. and Hyper-automation. By integrating and automating these enablers, Energizing Solutions approach is in a perfect position to develop and deliver scaled dashboard insights. Federated dashboarding will allow for expansion of observed data to be scaled down for more meaningful information. (C-suite = OKRs, VP/Directors = KPIs, BU Leads = performance metrics (people and systems).?
Next in the series:
Published on Energizing Solutions website:
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