Although observability is often viewed as a buzzword, it’s actually a valuable improvement over traditional application performance monitoring (APM) and network performance management (NPM). In fact, observability is crucial for maintaining system reliability as applications and infrastructure continue to become more complex.

Site reliability engineering (SRE) teams in particular are adopting observability to help organizations understand and manage systems, and in turn, deliver better user experiences. By providing deeper insights into internal system performance, observability goes beyond traditional monitoring to handle the dynamic nature of today’s applications and infrastructure.

In this article, we’ll discuss the limitations of traditional monitoring practices, how observability can overcome the challenges of maintaining modern systems, and why organizations should consider emerging practices like observability, SRE, and platform engineering.

The Limitations of Traditional Monitoring Practices

In the past, most applications had monolithic architectures and networks with clearly defined perimeters that did not change frequently. This made it possible to define specific metrics for tracking system health and rely on static dashboards to resolve known issues. However, with the distributed and dynamic nature of cloud native application deployments, it’s no longer enough to monitor individual components in isolation.

The performance of today’s systems is heavily impacted by the way different components interact with each other, so a more holistic approach is necessary to understand overall system behavior. However, traditional monitoring tools fail to provide comprehensive insights into the dependencies of different components.

Although traditional monitoring tools can alert IT operations teams to major problems like downtime, they often provide little insight into the root cause of complex issues. This led to prolonged troubleshooting while engineers manually sifted through different data sources to piece together what went wrong. Manually correlating data for root cause analysis was time-consuming and error-prone, and often had to occur during system outages that were already impacting users.

Traditional monitoring also lacked granular data for uncovering unknown problems. Since monitoring was often limited to pre-defined metrics and thresholds, it made it difficult to detect potential issues before they escalated. This reactive approach meant unknown problems were left unresolved until they became a significant disruption later on.

How Observability Enables Better Monitoring

Observability takes a more comprehensive approach than traditional monitoring by analyzing a large number of outputs to better understand the internal state of systems. This data collection approach goes beyond simple pre-defined metrics to include logs, metrics, traces, and more. By analyzing comprehensive observability data, it’s possible to get a more holistic view of complex distributed systems and proactively resolve potential issues.

Most observability tools, such as Chronosphere, also offer dynamic dashboards that adapt to rapidly changing environments and workloads. As distributed systems evolve, observability ensures SRE teams maintain visibility into the current state of production environments. AI and other advanced data analytics methods also enable newer observability tools to automatically correlate data from logs, metrics, and traces to streamline root cause analysis and offer a more accurate understanding of different system components.

Additionally, observability tools allow SRE teams to actively monitor and analyze system data in real time, which helps them detect anomalies or deviations that may indicate potential issues or system degradations. This helps SRE teams uncover unknown issues before they escalate into major problems that impact users.

The in-depth data that observability tools track also enables more precise performance tuning and optimization. For example, SRE teams can identify performance bottlenecks, inefficient resource usage, and other opportunities for improvement to achieve greater reliability.

Finally, observability takes a more user-centric approach to system operations. While traditional monitoring focuses on uptime and availability, observability emphasizes experience metrics that impact user satisfaction. A proactive approach to issue detection and troubleshooting can also prevent outages that could impact user retention.

The Future of Observability

Observability is rapidly evolving, driven by new advancements in technologies as well as the increasing complexity of modern systems. Here are a few observability trends:

• AI and machine learning algorithms continue to become more sophisticated, and these new technologies will further improve predictive analytics for anticipating potential system issues. These advancements will enable observability tools to offer more accurate insights that wouldn’t have been possible with traditional monitoring.
• Self-healing systems will be able to resolve issues without human intervention. Future observability tools will continue to include more features that autonomously detect and respond to issues as they arise, bringing many organizations closer to developing self-healing systems.
• Edge and IoT observability beyond centralized data centers is becoming even more important. Traditional monitoring is not sufficient for distributed environments, and observability tools will need to provide visibility across many different types of hardware and networks with larger geographic footprints.
• Security monitoring and observability will continue to converge under a new approach called security observability. Many observability tools will continue to integrate features related to security analytics, vulnerability detection, and compliance monitoring into a unified platform.
• Cost optimization features will continue to be added to observability tools, with advanced analytics to identify inefficiencies and recommend ways to optimize resource usage. Combining FinOps and observability will help many organizations balance performance with budget constraints to better meet business requirements.

Observability Is Crucial for Modern Systems

Although traditional monitoring is still important, observability practices significantly enhance the ability for SRE teams to understand, manage, and optimize complex systems. By leveraging observability for deeper insights, proactive issue detection, and comprehensive visibility, organizations can deliver more reliable applications to end users.

As forward-thinking companies continue to look for innovative ways to overcome the challenges with infrastructure management and modern software development, many are adopting platform engineering as well. Platform engineering integrates the benefits of observability with streamlined development workflows and automation to further enhance system reliability and performance.

An experienced enterprise solutions partner like AHEAD helps organizations rapidly modernize their software delivery processes and infrastructure. This includes Platform Engineering as a Service and other services related to observability and SRE.

To learn more, get in touch with us today.