A reliable digital customer experience is critical to the success of digital-first businesses. Each minute of downtime can result in the loss of revenue, unsatisfied customers, and damage to reputation. However, as your uptime gets closer to 100%, it gets exponentially harder to improve and often comes at the cost of speed of innovation. A good balance between innovation (i.e., new feature releases) and maintaining an acceptable level of reliability is key to success in the digital world.

Just about every organization today relies on key applications running on complex multi-cloud environments to transact business and enable users to work. It is critical to ensure that those applications are running optimally. A solid monitoring and alerting system is required to know when an issue needs attention. But having a robust monitoring system is not enough.

Have you ever tried to find a bug in a multi-layered architecture? Although this might sound like a simple enough task, it can quickly become a nightmare if the system doesn’t have proper monitoring. And the more distributed your system is, the more complex it becomes to analyze the root cause of a problem. That’s precisely why observability is key in distributed systems. Observability can be thought of as the advanced version of application monitoring.

A goal of open-source observability is unifying several different signals to provide the observability everyone wants. It’s always interesting to speak to people on this journey, and how they try to provide it through open-source projects, and the challenges they can face. I was thrilled to host Pranay Prateek on the most recent episode of the OpenObservability Talks podcast.

One of the most important pieces of operating any application stack is making sure you’re aware of the logging events occurring on your running systems. If your development team is like most, then you collaborate with your colleagues using Slack. Being successful while building and operating software includes looking for ways to implement high-visibility operations within your team communication platform.

Syslog is an event logging standard that lets almost any device or application send data about status, events, diagnostics, and more. It’s commonly used by network and storage devices to ship observability data to analytics platforms and SIEMs in order to support and secure the enterprise. Syslog is an excellent lightweight protocol to get telemetry from small scale devices.

Splunk embodies the top 5 principles of unified security and observability, and has been an expert in log management, security, and observability for years.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) is an isolated and secure virtual network in which you can deploy resources, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) instances, while restricting their exposure to the internet. As part of your monitoring strategy, you can collect and analyze VPC flow logs, which record network traffic flow between VPC components.

Without Network Monitoring, there is no good way to get a real-time view of your connected environment. But with Network Monitoring reports, you can look backwards to spot problems and trends. Just as vital are logs that deepen this rear-view mirror look, as they contain all the data for all the elements you are monitoring.

A logging framework is a software tool that helps developers output diagnostic information during the execution of a program. This information is used to debug the program or monitor its performance. There are many different logging frameworks available, starting with simple logging libraries to full-fledged logging and observability platforms.