The advent of Observability driven development
A distributed application landscape with high cardinality makes it difficult for dedicated operation teams to monitor system behavior via a dashboard or react abruptly to system alerts and notifications. In a microservices architecture with several moving parts, detecting failures becomes cumbersome, and developers end up looking at errors like finding a needle in a haystack.
What is Observability?
Observability is more than a quality attribute and one level above monitoring, where the focus applies more to cultivating ways of working within development teams to have a holistic data-driven mindset when it comes to solving system issues.
An observability thought process enables development teams to embed the monitoring aspect right at the nascent stage of development and testing.
Observability in a DevSecOps ecosystem
Several Organizations are adopting a DevSecOps culture, and it has become essential for development teams to become self-reliant and have a proactive approach to identify, heal and prevent systems faults. DevOps focuses on giving the development teams ability to make rapid decisions and more control to access infrastructure assets. Observability enhances this by empowering development teams to be more instinctive when it comes to defining system faults.
Furthermore, the modern ways of working with Agile, Test Driven Development, and Automation enable development teams to get deep insights into operations that can potentially be prone to failures.
Observability on Cloud platforms
Applications deployed on Cloud provide the development teams with several out-of-box myriads of system measurements. Developers can gauge and derive quality attributes of a system even before a code goes into production. Cloud services make it easy to collate information like metrics, diagnostics, logs, and traces for analysis, and they are available at the developer’s behest. AI-based automated diagnostics along with real-time data give developers deep acumen into their system semantics and characteristics.
Conclusion
Observability is more of an open-ended process of inculcating modern development principles to increase the reliability of complex distributed systems. The benefits of the Observability mindset helps organizations resolve production issues speedily, reduces dependency and cost on manual operations. It also benefits development teams to build dependable systems helping end customers with a seamless user experience.
