What tools do you use to manage the increasing speed and intensity of digital traffic? How do you monitor digital value chains, ensure timeliness and accuracy? How do you check technical performance, functional operation, and identify the true root cause—whether it lies in the infrastructure, application, or supplier? Observability is the answer.
Why observability
Increasing development speed is essential for most organizations and companies to survive and grow. Customers and suppliers – and therefore your own business users – demand constant system availability, scalability, and continuous updates. Thanks to the introduction of distributed systems (microservices), it has become easier to expand systems and replace components. Methods like DevOps, CI/CD, Agile, and SAFe enable rapid deployments. Together, this creates a highly dynamic IT landscape of in-house products, packaged software, and SaaS services. However, this also makes monitoring the IT landscape significantly more complex.
Chain-based approach
From a technical perspective, we tend to focus on the performance of individual components. But for the customer or user, the entire chain must function smoothly (in line with Experience Level Agreements, XLA’s). Observability is a more holistic approach, where the entire chain is considered, and you check from the perspective of business functionality whether systems and processes continue to perform reliably. It helps you detect potential issues in a complex IT landscape, trace causes, and deploy targeted recovery actions.
Anticipate with Observability
Observability gives you a kind of sensory system to pick up early signals. By interpreting these signals, you get a picture of the internal state and can even predict the next state. This allows you to proactively (and automatically) take measures to prevent real problems (i.e., disruptions to the business). For example, you can scale up resources such as containers, Virtual Machines, or memory. By setting boundaries, you can automatically implement mitigating actions. While monitoring is often reactive, observability oversees the entire IT landscape. With the use of AI/Machine Learning, you can predict anomalies and act on them proactively.
A tailor-made solution… is the only solution
Observability sounds great… We’ll take one of those! – Unfortunately… at ilionx we don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all approach. Observability is a concept that must be tailored to your organization, both technically and organizationally. What exactly is needed? What are the critical processes that require extra attention? Before you start running, you’ll want a clear understanding of:
- Processes & Chains: What are your key processes, what quality do you guarantee, or what XLA’s do you want to meet? What is needed to keep production running, what steering information is required, and what is necessary to continue closing transactions?
- Which components within the landscape are in scope? What decentralized monitoring information is already available?
The observability stack you choose (such as Elastic, Splunk, Dynatrace, Datadog) must fit your organization, your ambitions, and your application landscape. That’s why we always support the selection and implementation with a multidisciplinary approach, involving Engineers, Data Scientists, and Business Analysts to ensure a perfectly tailored solution.
How to successfully implement the Observability concept
Modern applications often already produce Logs, Metrics, and (sometimes also) Traces. On their own, they don’t yet provide insight into the broader system context, but they are valuable ingredients for successful observability. The step-change you make with observability is the chain-based approach where you follow end-to-end information flows: distributed traces and APM (Application Performance Monitoring).
This way, you can report centrally on the health (‘state’) of your entire system and send alerts and make adjustments. However, it’s important to tailor observability to your specific situation:
- Understand the processes and value chains: how are services and capabilities delivered?
- What are your critical signal values?
- Alignment with your suppliers: can they meet the XLA’s you’ve set?
- Where do errors and deviations originate?
- Who is responsible for (automated) follow-up actions?
In top gear… and in control
We see more and more organizations wanting to keep developing at full speed to meet customer expectations. This is also necessary to stay ahead of the competition. Observability allows you to combine speed and control in a complex landscape: you detect deviations in your systems and processes early, allowing you to anticipate potential issues. This way, you remain in control of your systems and your business.
Want to learn more about observability and how we can help your organization combine development speed and control? Feel free to contact us, we’d be happy to discuss your situation and options.
Author: Berend Onnes