Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In our inaugural State of Availability Report, we discovered that not only do metrics matter but the way we use them also does. Our research found that teams with fewer KPIs were more likely to meet their Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and provide their customers with higher levels of availability. The problem with having too many KPIs is that they cause information overload and noise.

You know that old adage about not seeing the forest for the trees? In our Authors’ Cut series, we’ve been looking at the trees that make up the observability forest—among them, CI/CD pipelines, Service Level Objectives, and the Core Analysis Loop. Today, I'd like to step back and take a look at how observability fits into the broader technical and cultural shifts in technology: cloud-native, DevOps, and SRE.

Google has had an outsized impact on the world, from its unrivaled search engine to its expansion into a range of customer-focused services. It would be difficult to make an impact of this magnitude without also leading the way in the software development industry. One of its biggest contributions to the community is a set of principles known as site reliability engineering or SRE.

StackState’s new 4T Monitors introduce the ability to monitor IT topology as it changes over time. Now your observability processes can trigger alerts on changes in topology that don’t match an ideal state, on deviations in metrics and events and on complex combinations of parameters. Monitoring topology as part of your observability efforts enriches the concept of environment health by adding the dimension of topology.

OpenTelemetry is an open source, vendor-neutral observability framework that provides tools, APIs, and SDKs to collect and standardize telemetry data from cloud-native applications and services. One of OpenTelemetry’s key components is the OpenTelemetry Collector, which receives and processes data before using exporters to route it to the destinations of your choice.

OpenTelemetry is an open source set of tools and standards that provide visibility into cloud-native applications. OpenTelemetry allows you to collect metrics, traces, and logs from applications written in many languages and export them to a backend of your choice.