Cloud-native technologies have taken center stage since their introduction. They are reshaping the landscape of application development, delivery, and operations, creating a new competitive paradigm where speed outpaces scale. Traditional technology stacks in monolithic applications are quickly replaced. They form modern, microservices-based applications hosted in different cloud environments orchestrated using Kubernetes and employing containerization to convert workloads to serverless setups.
Application performance monitoring is critical to understanding how your cloud-native applications are performing. However, microservices-based applications create synergies between software and infrastructure due to their complexity and constant communication. This enhanced communication requires more comprehensive solutions and a holistic approach to achieve complete visibility across the entire product.
Observability began to become increasingly important around the same time as cloud-native applications as a way to achieve end-to-end visibility into the performance of your entire IT infrastructure. With observability, you can capture data and use this information to evaluate and optimize your applications.
How to implement observability?
To get a complete view of your entire application stack, you must strengthen the three pillars of observability: metrics, tracing, and logging. By strengthening these three pillars, you will achieve end-to-end visibility and make more data-driven decisions for your business. Let’s look at the three pillars of observability and what they do:
index
In the world of systems analysis, metrics are crucial key performance indicators (KPIs), revealing the complexity of our systems. The values utilized by these monitoring tools vary depending on the specific component of interest. For example, when looking at a website, metrics include response time, page load duration, and throughput. For server components, metrics typically include CPU utilization and memory utilization. Therefore, the metrics collected are based on the specific domain under review, providing customized insights into system performance.
trace
Tracking is a detailed record of a user’s path within an application. But why is this kind of detailed tracking so important? Tracing provides a roadmap that leads you directly to the exact line of code where the problem occurs. It is at this precise level that meaningful optimization can occur. In today’s environment of distributed applications, our attention turns to distributed traces, which provide a comprehensive view of complex digital pathways.
log
Logs are machine-generated, time-stamped records of system and software events that can be used for debugging applications. Logs provide necessary context by enabling developers and system administrators to trace the sequence of events that led to a specific problem, diagnose root causes, and improve overall system performance.
Challenges of implementing observability in cloud-native applications
Modern applications have multiple microservices that must communicate with each other to fulfill user requests. This means more endpoints need to be monitored to ensure your application is functioning properly. Traditional monitoring tools can meet these needs to a certain extent, but they still fall short in many aspects:
- Traditional monitoring tools cannot effectively monitor distributed environments. Today’s IT systems extend across a variety of networks, cloud platforms, and containers, forming a complex network of interconnected components running within clusters, microservices, and serverless frameworks. These components often exist in different data centers, in different geographies, and on different servers, resulting in operational complexity that traditional tools cannot manage.
- Cloud-native applications generate large amounts of data, including logs, metrics, and traces, which help you gather meaningful information about application performance. However, managing and evaluating such large amounts of data on the fly can be overwhelming without the right tools.
- Cloud-native applications can scale quickly, allowing their components to quickly expand or contract in response to changing needs. This ensures optimal resource utilization and cost efficiency. However, ensuring seamless functionality as application components dynamically adjust to meet demand is a challenge. Ensuring a flawless user experience even during peak demand periods requires a more comprehensive monitoring approach that provides instant analysis, effective troubleshooting and end-to-end visibility into all elements of the IT infrastructure.
Characteristics that an observable platform must possess
Choosing the right tools is critical to overcoming the challenges of achieving full observability in cloud-native applications. Make sure to choose an observable platform with the following capabilities:
Ability to collect data from all layers of the technology stack
Implementing multiple tools with different capabilities increases your overhead and leads to wasted resources. Therefore, it is important to choose a single tool with end-to-end monitoring capabilities that provides end-to-end visibility of IT systems and facilitates fast, targeted troubleshooting.
Ability to quickly diagnose and resolve problems
Choose a tool that captures and optimizes a variety of engineering metrics, such as mean time to fix, mean time to detection, and time to deploy in a cloud-native environment. The tool should provide instant insights that are critical for improving basic business KPIs such as payment failures, order processing, and application delays.
Ability to deploy in multi-cloud environments
Choose a tool that facilitates seamless integration of cloud-native applications across multi-cloud environments and provides a unified dashboard and analytics platform. This ensures consistent monitoring and analysis and simplifies application management, no matter which cloud provider you use.
Introduction to Site24x7’s Observability Platform
Site24x7 is an AI-powered end-to-end observability platform that allows you to continuously monitor all elements of your IT infrastructure and promptly detect and resolve any issues that may arise in real time. This tool uses the three pillars of observability and the golden signals of site reliability engineering such as latency, errors, traffic, and saturation to capture all the data you need. With the Site24x7 observability platform, you can monitor applications built in Java, .NET, Python, PHP, Node.js, or Ruby; deploy them across a variety of cloud environments from a single console; and quickly identify and troubleshoot Performance bottleneck.
Site24x7 is a comprehensive solution that not only optimizes the technical aspects but also enhances the customer experience, ensuring seamless and efficient operations. Site24x7’s observability platform is cost-effective, holistic, and easily scales and adapts to your applications.
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author:
Anusha Natarajan, Product Marketer at Site24x7.
