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Observability

The latest News and Information on Observabilty for complex systems and related technologies.

How Much Should My Observability Stack Cost?

What should one pay for observability? How much observability is enough? How much is too much, or is there such a thing? Is it better to pay for one product that claims (dubiously) to do everything, or twenty products that are each optimized to do a different part of the problem super well? It’s almost enough to make a busy engineer say “Screw it, I’m spinning up Nagios”. (Hey, I said almost.)

Cutting-Edge Observability Tools into a Single Platform

Sematext provides a single pane of glass and machine learning powered alerts for logs, metrics, traces and user experience data. Sematext Cloud provides advanced monitoring, logging and tracing for all Docker platforms such as Docker EE, Kubernetes, GKE, AWS ECS, and IBM Cloud. Sematext’s new monitoring agent leverages the powerful eBPF Linux kernel observability functionality and uses the Kubernetes API to enrich the container and cluster level metrics.

"Observability": Just a Fancy Word for "Monitoring"? A Journey From What to Why

Too often, monitoring is a never-ending arms race. We keep adding more monitoring in response to new problems, but the cycle never seems to end. Humans, (the business), drive new changes, which cause new problems, and need more, new monitoring. And that’s where real, useful observability may be able to help finally identify root cause and break the cycle of reactive monitoring for novel issues.

Beginner's Guide to Observability

Gaining insights from your data requires more than collecting and analyzing metrics and logs. With the acceleration of customer and business demands, site reliability engineers and IT Ops analysts now require operational visibility into their entire architecture, something that traditional APM tools, dev logging tools, and SRE tools aren't equipped to provide. Observability enables you to inspect and understand your IT stack; but what is it, and how does it differ from IT monitoring?

Honeycomb and Rookout: An Integration That Finds the Dots to Connect

You probably know that Honeycomb is the most flexible observability tool around. Its powerful high-cardinality search makes working with real raw data quick and easy. But as you may have learned through hard experience, fetching those dots can still be quite a challenge.

Observability-Driven Development

TDD is table stakes for any good team, but it’s not enough: these days you need ODD: Observability-Driven Development (and Design). Observability should be baked into every step of your software development process, from conception to maintenance period. No pull request should ever be accepted without being able to answer the question, "how will you know if this works?".

Is observability good for our brain? How about post-mortems?

Your software stack likely consists of web servers, search engines, queues, databases, etc. Each part of your stack emits its own metrics and logs. Depending on the size of your team and structure, different team members might have permissions to look at one set of data, but not the other. Some data is needed for troubleshooting and can be discarded after just a few days, while more important data might need to be kept for months for legal or capacity planning purposes.

The Future of DevOps Observability: The Evolution of Logging, Monitoring and Metrics

LogDNA is uniquely positioned to have enabled thousands of customers to gain deep insights into their DevOps infrastructure. As the industry has shifted to microservices and Kubernetes we have helped our customers migrate and deploy world-class infrastructure. Based on our experience we see three main pillars when it comes to the future of DevOps: Monitoring, Analytics, and Logging.

Cloud OnAir: CE TV: Application Observability with LightStep

Observability remains a key challenge as customers embrace DevOps. Join Daniel "Spoons" Spoonhower, the CTO and Founder of Lightstep, a Google Cloud customer, and Yuri Grinshteyn, a Google Cloud Customer Engineer to learn about how Lightstep was built on Google Cloud to enable you to monitor what matters most and diagnose anomalies within seconds across web, mobile, monoliths and microservices.