Why do organizations invest in observability? Because it adds value. Sometimes we forget this when we’re building our observability solutions. We get so excited about what we’re tracking that we can lose sight of why we’re tracking it. Technical metrics reveal how systems react to change. What they don’t give is a picture of how change impacts the broader business goals. The importance of qualitative data in business observability is often overlooked.

A selection of live questions and answers from the audience of our recent webinar on how site reliability engineers can best leverage intelligent observability to monitor SLIs and SLOs, prioritize reliability over functionality, and more.

By 2022, Gartner estimates that more than 3 out of 4 global organizations will be running containerized applications in production. With this comes a new set of monitoring challenges — ephemeral, short-lived infrastructure, complex service interdependencies and on-call developers who now need access to data for fast troubleshooting, just to name a few.

Did you know that the VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront engineering team not only listens to input from customers, but acts on that input to improve the overall Tanzu Observability experience? In fact, as a direct result of customer surveys, the Wavefront engineering team recently completed 30 days of improvement focused on query quality. I will quickly run through those improvements in this post.

The concept of unified IT observability has gained newfound importance in today’s world of remote work, hybrid infrastructures, and technological convergence. In this video, Christina Kosmowski, President at LogicMonitor, shares five tips on how to power your business forward and achieve unified IT observability during uncertain times.

There is an idea of the relationship between observability and monitoring, that they complement each other in an inseparable way. While true that you can only monitor a system that is observable, the line dividing observability and monitoring grows narrower with every deployment you make; making these two practices less of a pairing and more a single entity.

Software companies are in a constant pursuit to optimize their delivery flow and increase release velocity. But as they get better at CI/CD in the spirit of “move fast and break things,” they are also being forced to have a very sobering conversation about “how do we fix all those things we’ve been breaking so fast?” As a result, today’s cloud-native world is fraught with production errors, and in dire need of observability.

Kafka is a distributed, highly available event streaming platform which can be run on bare metal, virtualized, containerized, or as a managed service. At its heart, Kafka is a publish/subscribe (or pub/sub) system, which provides a "broker" to dole out events. Publishers post events to topics, and consumers subscribe to topics. When a new event is sent to a topic, consumers that subscribe to the topic will receive a new event notification.

IT Operations teams are often the bedrock of the digital business, ensuring that processes and services continue humming smoothly as developers continue to evolve and increase customer value. But increasingly complex systems can flood them with alerts that get in the way of operators from doing their best work and paving the way for new, innovative services.

After we’d fixed Aparna’s network issue, James came to see me at my desk. Masks on, socially distanced and all that, but it was nice to have some face-to-face time. James is cool – that dry British humor and not your classic IT Ops dude. He’s been here forever and mentored me when the CIO, Charlie, hired me as the first SRE here a year or so ago. I lucked out really.