A new year has started and I've been pondering my hopes and dreams for the year to come. In the world of SRE, observability is the most prominent pillar of my work. So, I decided to drill into the topic of observability and what I'd like to see happen in the industry in 2023. Rather than focusing on any tool, technology, or methodology, I'lll be exploring concepts that can be broadly applied in any organization.

As a leader in observability and application performance monitoring (APM), New Relic empowers engineers with a data-driven approach to planning, building, deploying, and running great software. Last month, we announced support for New Relic on the CloudZero platform. With this new functionality, customers can gain visibility into their New Relic spend, combine it with any other IT or infrastructure spend, and achieve a complete view of business dimensions — such as products and customers.

Elastic Observability 8.6 introduces a set of capabilities improving production operations through the introduction of host (EC2/GCP compute/Azure compute) observability, application dependency operations views (insights into databases, caches, etc), and a new connector for Opsgenie. These new features allow customers to: Elastic Observability 8.6 is available now on Elastic Cloud — the only hosted Elasticsearch offering to include all of the new features in this latest release.

While IT pros know they need to monitor IT services, they also know it can be the most difficult part of their job. Traditionally, enterprises have cobbled together several disparate monitoring products to address all their monitoring needs – but there are often gaps. Within these gaps, issues are missed, and the possibility of proactive issue resolution becomes nearly impossible.

I recently attended a virtual event and heard the speaker comment, “Relational databases don’t scale.” To my ears, this is about as silly a statement as saying, “No one can eat 26 hot dogs in 12 minutes” right before Kobayashi shows up and eats 50. In my experience, relational databases scale when they’re placed in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing. Just imagine if Kobayashi was your data architect!

David Calvert is a site reliability engineer working remotely from the south of France. He’s currently focused on observability, reliability, and security aspects of cloud infrastructure. You can find him as dotdc on GitHub and @0xDC_ on Twitter. Over the past three years, I’ve built and operated Kubernetes clusters for two different companies — the first one on-premises, and the second on a public cloud platform for my current job at Powder.

Brick by brick, block by block—if you’ve been with us throughout our Author’s Cut blog series (and if you haven’t, you can go catch up), you’ve seen us build the case for observability from the ground up. We’ve covered structured events, the core analysis loop, and use cases for managing applications in production—and that’s just to start.