Observability: The Key to Enlightened Engineering

If you're in the software engineering world, you know that the complexity of modern applications is growing at a rapid pace. Issues can escalate quickly, leading to costly downtime and lost revenue. That's where observability comes in as a key pillar of enlightened engineering.

Observability is all about monitoring, analysing, and visualising your system's data and events in real-time. This enables you to quickly identify and resolve issues before they become big problems. With observability, you can understand the internal state of a system from its external outputs.

Studies show that an enhanced observability approach can have a significant positive impact on production quality and engineer productivity. According to a survey conducted by Honeycomb, teams that adopted an observability approach saw a 68% improvement in their incident response time and a 76% improvement in their overall engineering productivity.

Why Adopting an Observability-Led Approach is Critical

With observability, you can make more informed decisions and prioritise tasks based on their impact on the business. By quickly identifying which components of your system are causing issues, you can focus your efforts on addressing those specific areas.

Observability also provides insights into how your system is being used by end-users, allowing you to make data-driven decisions on how to improve the user experience. This can lead to increased user satisfaction and retention.

It is impossible to fully embrace the DevOps ‘three ways’ of flow, feedback and continuous improvement without a solid observability backbone. You need observability of your pipelines and testing cycles to optimise everything for faster throughput. You need observability to create, shorten and amplify feedback loops. Continuous experimentation and learning from failures thrive in an environment with great observability. It is also a safety net that encourages teams to push the boundaries of what was thought achievable by providing a ‘fail-fast-and-learn’ environment.

Observability works best when it is baked in during the system design rather than added as an afterthought. You decide your choice of telemetry framework upfront so that the whole engineering organisation can adopt the same choice of collectors, reporters and exporters in your service templates.?

Selecting the Right Observability Tooling and Vendor

Choosing the right observability tooling and vendor is essential to ensuring the success of your observability strategy. There are many different options available, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

When selecting an observability tooling and vendor, consider your organization's specific needs and goals. Evaluate factors such as ease of deployment, scalability, customization, and support. Also, don't forget to consider the build versus buy decision. Building your own observability solution may seem appealing, but it can be time-consuming and expensive. Buying a pre-built solution can be a more cost-effective option.

An early stage organisation might do well to stick with open source DIY tooling. Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger etc are popular choices at this stage. As you scale up, going for commercial feature-rich solutions becomes more appealing.?

The Journey

It is important to define goals and success criteria that are appropriate for the maturity stage. For an organisation at the beginning stages of this journey, the first milestone is getting basic Up/Down status information from every single component in the system. Once you achieve that, you progress to the next stage of richer telemetry collection. Then you go for end-to-end traceability, and at the pinnacle, you will be aiming for predictive observability using AI.

Controlling Costs with FinOps Principles

While observability can provide significant benefits, it can also lead to cost overruns if not managed effectively. Applying FinOps principles when implementing an observability strategy can help you control costs.

FinOps is a set of practices and principles that enable organisations to manage their cloud costs more effectively. By implementing FinOps, you can ensure that you are only paying for the observability tooling you need and that you are not over-provisioning resources.

What Gets Monitored Gets Better

In conclusion, observability is critical to enlightened engineering. By adopting an observability-led approach, you can make more informed decisions, prioritise tasks, and improve incident response and resolution. Remember to select the right observability tooling and vendor, consider the build versus buy decision, and apply FinOps principles to control costs.