Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Observability is a term that is becoming commonplace in both startups and enterprises. Log observability is different from monitoring, as it provides visualized metrics from a variety of different systems in a single pane of glass view. This is invaluable for organizations to understand the interdependencies and links between external events and internal performance.

Ever since the very beginning, Honeycomb has poured a lot of heart and soul into our blog. We take pride in knowing it isn’t just your typical stream of feature updates and marketing promotions, but rather real, meaty pieces of technical depth, practical how-to guides, highly detailed retrospectives, and techno-philosophical pieces. One of my favorite things is when people who aren’t customers tell me how much they love our blog.

New Relic recently published a survey on the observability projections and trends for the year 2021. At observIQ, an emerging platform of choice in the observability space, we decided to give our users a rundown on what we agreed and disagreed within their survey results.

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.