Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

It started with a simple question: Why did one query take 10 seconds, while another almost identical query took 5? At Honeycomb, we use AWS Lambda to accelerate our query processing. It mostly works well, but it can be hard to understand and led us to wonder: What was really going on inside this box called Lambda? These questions kicked off the development of CONCURRENCY, a new aggregate in the Query Builder that lets us look at how many spans are active at once.

Logs play a key role in understanding your system’s performance and health. Good logging practice is also vital to power an observability platform across your system. Monitoring, in general, involves the collection and analysis of logs and other system metrics. Log analysis involves deriving insights from logs, which then feeds into observability. Observability, as we’ve said before, is really the gold standard for knowing everything about your system.

Modern software development is evolving rapidly, and while the latest innovations allow companies to grow through greater efficiency, there is a cost. Modern architectures are incredibly complex, which can make it challenging to diagnose and rectify performance issues. Once these issues affect customer experience, the consequences can be costly. So, what is the solution? Observability — which provides a visible overview of the big picture.

We know organizations today rely on software applications to drive their digital transformation, providing customers with the tools, features and experience end-users have come to expect when doing things such as transact, work and communicate, to name a few. Ensuring a great user experience, however, means making sure the various elements making up a usable application are running smoothly and reliably.

I’ve spent most of my career working with tech in various forms, and for the last ten years or so, I’ve focused a lot on building, maintaining, and operating robust, reliable systems. This has led me to put a lot of time into researching, evaluating, and implementing different solutions for automatic failure detection, monitoring, and more recently, observability. Before we get started: What is observability?

Two years ago, I wrote a long retrospective of observability for its third anniversary. It includes a history of instrumentation and telemetry, a detailed explanation of the technical spec, and why the whole “three pillars” thing is nonsense. At the time, it’s what was needed to steer conversations away from silly rabbit holes about data types and back to what matters: how we understand our systems.

We’re honored to be included in Enterprise Management Associates’ EMA Top 3 Award for Observability Platforms. This award recognizes software products that help enterprises reach their digital transformation goals by optimizing product quality, time to market, cost, and ability to innovate—all the things we’re passionate about at LogDNA.

Yoga is to ideal human health what observability is to an application’s ideal functioning. It is well established that observability is a critical factor for the successful implementation and maintenance of cloud-native, serverless, cloud-agnostic, and microservices-based applications. Well-established observability helps DevOps and development teams cross the boundaries of complex systems and get complete visibility into their functioning.