Product Observability: Beyond Engineering

Product (software) observability is one of the most important aspects of building a reliable software product. Yet, many software companies rarely pay attention to it or implement it in any form within their products.

This article aims to explain why observability is important for software companies and the benefits it offers to stakeholders beyond just achieving engineering excellence.

The Cost of Ignoring Observability

It’s Monday morning, and Jonny turns on his computer only to be greeted by endless email notifications from customers complaining about service outages. Thousands of customers are requesting refunds for their subscriptions. What is happening? Jonny quickly runs some tests and realizes that the servers are offline. In a rush to put the system back online, Jonny restarts the servers, but by then, the damage has already been done.

A few minutes after Jonny played the hero, saving the company from further embarrassment, the company leadership summoned everyone into the conference room for a quick postmortem to understand what led to the churn of thousands of customers and the loss of millions in revenue. Everyone looked to their new hero for answers, and to their surprise, his response was the same as everyone else’s: the servers crashed.

Jonny’s story highlights the consequences of neglecting observability. Without it, the team was unable to identify the root cause of the outage in real time, leading to lost customers and revenue. This raises the question: how can companies avoid such disasters in the future? The answer lies in observability.

What is Observability?

Observability, or software observability, is the ability to measure and understand the internal state of a software product based on its external outputs. These outputs—such as logs, metrics, traces, and events—enable teams to gain insights into system behavior, performance, and potential issues, enabling better decision-making, troubleshooting, and maintenance. A fully observable product allows engineers to understand its internal state without requiring direct access to its internal workings. This means questions about uptime, errors, performance, and resource utilisation can be answered with ease.

Why does observability matter?

Observability is more than just a tool for engineers—it plays a vital role in ensuring reliability and performance of software products. Here are some of the reasons why observability matters:

• Improve product reliability: Reliable software consistently performs its intended functions without failure. Observability ensures engineers can detect and resolve issues before they impact end users, leading to higher system uptime and fewer outages.

• Performance Optimization: With observability, teams can identify bottlenecks and optimize system performance to meet user expectations, such as low latency or offline-first functionality, while saving resources and costs.
• Enhanced User Experience: Observability helps detect issues that degrade the user experience, such as slow response times or downtime, allowing teams to act swiftly to maintain user satisfaction.

• Data-Driven Marketing Insights: Observability provides data on feature usage and system performance, enabling marketing teams to promote features that resonate most with users.

• Better Collaboration Across Teams: By providing a shared source of truth, observability enables effective communication and collaboration between engineering and operations teams.

Key Components of Observability

To achieve effective observability, it’s important to understand its core components:

• Logs: Logs are structured or unstructured records that capture events within the system. They provide detailed insights into what the application is doing at any given time and are crucial for debugging and tracing issues.

• Metrics: Metrics are numerical data points collected over time, representing specific aspects of system performance. Examples include CPU usage, memory utilization, request rates, and error rates. Metrics are typically aggregated and visualized to monitor trends.

• Traces: Traces represent the journey of a request as it travels through different components of a distributed system. Tracing helps identify performance bottlenecks and dependencies, making it easier to pinpoint where problems occur.

How to Implement Observability

Implementing observability has become relatively straightforward, thanks to the availability of powerful tools. Here are a few tools to help you get started:

? New Relic: New Relic offers a comprehensive observability platform with real-time insights into application performance and infrastructure health.

? Datadog: Datadog is a comprehensive observability and monitoring platform tailored for cloud-native applications and modern infrastructures. It provides real-time visibility into application performance, system metrics, logs, and distributed traces, enabling seamless monitoring of complex systems.

? IBM Instana: IBM Instana provides automated application performance monitoring and observability for microservices and cloud-native applications.

? Grafana Labs: Grafana Labs is an open-source observability platform that specializes in data visualization, monitoring, and alerting for cloud-native and modern IT infrastructures. It offers tools to query, visualize, and analyze metrics, logs, and traces across various data sources, making it a preferred choice for DevOps teams and engineers.

? Prometheus: Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit, originally developed by SoundCloud and now a project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It is widely used for monitoring cloud-native applications and infrastructure due to its scalability, flexibility, and robust support for time-series metrics.

? OpenTelemetry: OpenTelemetry is a popular open-source observability framework designed to standardize the collection of telemetry data (logs, metrics, and traces) from cloud-native, distributed systems. It is a vendor-agnostic initiative managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and is widely adopted by developers and organizations to implement consistent and reliable observability across their systems. One of its key features is that it frees users from vendor lock-in.

Other tools to consider include Dynatrace, Splunk, AppDynamics, Sumo Logic, and SolarWinds Observability.

In the next part of this article, we will discuss how to choose the right observability tools for your project.

Conclusion

Observability is no longer a luxury; it’s a necessity for building reliable, high-performing software products. It goes beyond just engineering excellence, offering benefits for marketing, collaboration, and user experience. By implementing observability practices and leveraging the right tools, software companies can avoid Jonny’s predicament, ensure system reliability, and keep their customers happy.