WTH is Observability?

Have you ever wondered what’s going on inside your smartphone, your laptop, or your car? How do they work, and why do they sometimes fail or act weird? How do you fix them when they do?

These are the kinds of questions that observability can help you answer. Observability is a fancy word for knowing what the heck is going on with your software and systems. It’s like having a superpower that lets you see inside the black box of your devices and find out why they are slow, buggy, or broken.

What is observability and why does it matter?

Observability is the ability to measure and understand the internal state of a system based on the data it produces. Observability helps you to answer questions like:

• What is the status and health of my system?
• How is my system performing and behaving?
• What are the root causes and impacts of issues or anomalies?
• How can I improve or optimize my system?

Observability is important because it helps you to deliver better outcomes for your business and your customers. With observability, you can:

• Improve the performance and reliability of your system.
• Enhance the customer experience and satisfaction.
• Accelerate the innovation and delivery of your system.

How is observability different from monitoring?

Monitoring is the process of collecting and displaying data about the performance and availability of a system. Monitoring helps you to detect and alert on issues or deviations.

Observability, on the other hand, is the capability that enables monitoring. Observability provides you with the data and the tools to understand and explore the system, and to answer any questions you may have.

Observability goes beyond monitoring in several ways:

• Observability is proactive, not reactive.
• Observability allows you to ask any question and discover any unknown or unexpected issue or opportunity.
• Observability is holistic, not siloed.
• Observability integrates and correlates all the data and dimensions of the system, and provides a unified and comprehensive view.
• Observability is intelligent, not manual.
• Observability leverages artificial intelligence and automation to provide you with precise and actionable answers, not just raw data or alerts.

How can you achieve observability?

To achieve observability, you need to collect and analyze three types of data from your system: logs, metrics, and traces.

These are the three pillars of observability.

• Logs are records of events that occur in your system. Logs provide a detailed and contextual information about what happened.
• Metrics are numerical measurements of the state and behavior of your system. Metrics give quantitative and aggregated information about how your system is performing and behaving.
• Traces are sequences of events that represent the flow of a request or a transaction through your system. Traces provide causal and temporal information about how your system components interact with each other.

You also need to:

• Instrument your system to generate and emit the data. This can be done manually or automatically.
• Store and manage the data in a scalable and reliable way. This can be done by using tools or platforms that can ingest, process, and store the data.
• Visualize and explore the data in a meaningful and intuitive way. This can be done by using tools or platforms that can aggregate, correlate, and analyze the data, and that can provide you with dashboards, charts, graphs, and maps.
• Apply artificial intelligence and automation to the data to provide you with actionable answers. This can be done by using tools or platforms that can apply machine learning, anomaly detection, root cause analysis, and remediation to the data, and that can provide you with alerts, recommendations, and solutions.

How can Dynatrace help you with observability?

Dynatrace is a leading platform for intelligent cloud observability. Dynatrace provides you with everything you need to achieve observability for your systems, including:

• Automatic instrumentation of your system components, without any code changes or manual configuration.
• Real-time and high-fidelity collection and analysis of logs, metrics, and traces from your system, as well as user experience and security data, to provide you with a complete and contextual view of your system and its environment.
• Dynamic and comprehensive mapping of the dependencies and relationships between your system components, and the impact and influence of your system on your customers and your business.
• Causation-based AI that can automatically detect and diagnose issues and anomalies in your system, and provide you with precise and actionable answers and solutions, not just data and alerts.
• Open and extensible platform that can integrate and interoperate with your existing tools and technologies, and that can support and enable your development and operations teams and processes.

Dynatrace also introduced Davis CoPilot, a generative AI-powered assistant that boosts your productivity and creativity. Davis CoPilot helps you to:

• Create queries, dashboards, and notebooks using natural language input, and get coding suggestions for workflow automation.
• Simplify and accelerate onboarding, configuration, and adoption of the Dynatrace platform, and get recommendations for best practices and use cases.
• Explore and discover new insights and opportunities from your data, and experiment and test new ideas and technologies.

For Indian customers, Dynatrace has a local SaaS presence in Mumbai. This means that you can keep your data in India and benefit from data privacy and security features. This is important in light of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, which regulates the processing of digital personal data in India. By leveraging the Dynatrace platform on AWS in Mumbai, you can:

• Comply with the local regulations and standards that govern the processing and protection of personal data in India, and avoid any legal or reputational risks.
• Reduce the latency and improve the performance of your system, as the data is processed and stored closer to your location and your customers.
• Save costs and resources, as you don’t need to invest in or maintain any infrastructure or hardware to run the Dynatrace platform.

I hope you enjoyed this post and found it useful. If you want to learn more about observability and Dynatrace, please feel free to leave a comment below or contact me directly.

Thank you for reading!