Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Today marks the start of a new chapter at Catchpoint, as we launch our digital experience observability platform. In this post, I’ll share with you some of the wider contextual factors driving this launch, as well as how the continuous evolution of our platform supports a massive market need.

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!