Dashboards are one of the most basic and popular tools software engineers use to operate their systems. In this post, I'll make the argument that their use is unfortunately too widespread, and that the reflex we have to use and rely on them tends to drown out better, more adapted approaches, particularly in the context of incidents.

Technologies such as serverless computing frameworks and CI/CD automation tools help accelerate software development lifecycles (SDLC) to give development teams a competitive edge in the marketplace. Armed with these technologies, teams can deploy and innovate faster and more frequently by automating repetitive tasks and eliminating the need to manage or provision servers.

DevOps culture revolutionized our industry. Continuous Delivery and Continuous Integration made six sigma reliability commonplace. 20 years ago we would kick the production servers and listen to the hard drive spin, that was observability. Today’s DevOps teams deploy monitoring tools that provide development teams with deep insight into the production environment. Before DevOps practices were commonplace, production used to fail. A lot.

If you’re working with microservices in a large distributed environment, you’ve probably got your monitoring and logging on lock, and you may even be lucky enough to have properly instrumented APM (distributed tracing) for consumer calls. But, did you know you’re likely still facing an observability gap? How many incidents have you worked that required hours of sleuthing only to end with a single team needing to roll back a deployment? It’s more common than you may think!

Ah, I too have wondered about this. TL;DR: The Resource says what program is sending these spans and where it’s running. You can skip it if you define OTEL_SERVICE_NAME in the environment. When I’m setting up tracing (for instance, in a Node.js app), I have to create a Resource object in order to set up the OpenTelemetry SDK: If I don’t define that resource parameter, then tracing will still work. But my spans will show up with aservice.name of unknown_service:node.

As today’s IT landscape becomes more complex, Infrastructure and Operation (I&O) leaders are forced to revisit their tools, systems, applications and teams. Why? Find out in our new infographic: "The Shift to Observability. And Why It’s Time.".

Ready to “rewind the movie” to see exactly what was going on in your stack at any moment in time? Ready to quickly go straight to the original source of the problem to solve issues faster? Check out our new infographic, Achieving True Observability With the 4Ts, to see how StackState’s unique 4T® data model correlates topology, telemetry and traces at every moment in time, to deliver real-time contextual insights into your entire IT landscape.