How to Build an Observability Framework

I want to offer you a glimpse into what OGF entails and its fundamental components.

While working with different organizations, SRE teams, and application teams, the team and I at cloudEQ identified the need for a robust Observability Governance Framework. This Framework addresses the challenges associated with implementing end-to-end Observability for Infrastructure (on-prem or cloud) and application performance monitoring in standard, scalable, and cost-effective ways across different environments and application teams or business units. The Observability Governance Framework (OGF) was developed to solve these challenges.

The Observability Governance Framework plays a pivotal role in standardizing observability practices within an organization, encompassing the following key aspects:

Instrumentation as Code (IaC):

It emphasizes using Instrumentation as Code to instrument services and resources for infrastructure (infra) and Application Performance Monitoring (APM). This becomes an integral part of the DevOps CI/CD workflow, ensuring observability is not an afterthought but an inherent aspect of the development and deployment process.

Alert Policies and Anomalies-Based Alerts:

OGF encourages setting up alert policies and utilizing an anomaly-based approach, harnessing the power of AIOPS (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations). Terraform is employed to maintain standardized and scalable alerting configurations across different contexts.

Escalation and Integration:

The framework helps establish workflows for integrating with escalation tools like pager duty or Opsgeine?and communication tools like MS Team or Slack, enabling quicker communication of issues. Critical alerts are seamlessly integrated with ITIL tools like ServiceNow to facilitate the creation of actionable incidents.

Optimized Logging Strategy:

OGF formulates a logging strategy to ensure efficient data collection and storage, enhancing overall observability.

?Workloads as Code:

Workloads are composite metrics; leveraging tools like Terraform promotes defining and setting up workloads as code, which aids in standardization and scalability across various environments and applications.

Service Level Indicators (SLI) and Objectives (SLO):

It defines SLIs and SLOs for infrastructure and APM and provides visibility into service-level agreements and objectives. The Application Command Center (ACC) and Universal Infra Dashboards play a significant role.

?Shift-Left Approach:

OGF advocates a shift-left approach in observability, providing developers and DevOps teams greater visibility through tools like the DevOps Command Center (DCC). This empowers them to proactively address observability concerns early in the development process.

?Business Observability:

Lastly, OGF extends insights to the C-suite audience through Business Observability Dashboards, offering visibility into the business services impact analysis and understanding customer digital experiences as a few use cases.

By addressing these core elements, the Observability Governance Framework ensures standardized, scalable, and effective observability practices across the organization, benefiting many stakeholders. The framework continually evolves and is refined by implementing observability as code practices.

?User Personas

?Application Developers:

OFG (Observability as Code Governance Framework) assists application development teams and DevOps through the DevOps Command Centre (DCC) Dashboard by offering visibility into code performance across various versions of APIs and services. Linking issues to the specific code enables faster error identification and resolution. Additionally, OFG provides visibility into infrastructure and application pipeline workflow runs, highlighting failures and errors with detailed logs to facilitate a quick understanding of the issues. This helps streamline the development and operations processes and enhances the overall efficiency of the teams.

?Site Reliability Engineers:

Another key objective of OGF is to empower Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) in managing the performance of enterprise-level applications, particularly those based on micro-services-driven distributed architectures. This is achieved using the ACC (Application Command Center), which will be further elaborated in a subsequent post. The ultimate aim is to expedite the identification of root causes for issues, leading to a reduction in Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR), thereby improving system reliability and performance. Furthermore, OGF promotes proactive measures by implementing synthetic use cases for monitoring service availability and user journeys from various locations. This proactive approach equips SRE teams with real-time insights, allowing them to anticipate and address potential application or service errors and failures before they occur, ultimately improving system reliability and performance while reducing Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR). ?I will write a separate article explaining the ACC and its benefits to SRE and applications teams.?

?C-Suite Business Executives (CIO, CTO, CDO, CMO, CEO, COO, CFO):

Additionally, OGF also offers business observability to the C-suite audience through dashboards. These dashboards provide insights into various aspects, such as customer digital experience, business services impact analysis, and tracking of business events, among other use cases.?

In summary, OGF (Observability as Code Governance Framework) assists organizations in managing complex and sizable application environments by implementing comprehensive observability in a standardized, scalable, and reusable fashion. It promotes the concept of observability as code, and its primary goals are to support developers, DevOps teams, SRE teams, and C-suite executives in achieving their business objectives.?

Let us know if you are facing similar environments and challenges we at cloudEQ can help set up the OGF.