Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

One of the more delicate debates in the DevOps world is what observability has to do with monitoring. Is observability just a trendy buzzword that means the same thing as monitoring? Is observability an improved version of monitoring? Are monitoring and observability different types of processes that solve different problems? The answer to those questions depends in part on your perspective.

With almost every blog you read about monitoring, troubleshooting, or more recently, the observability of modern application stacks, you’ve probably read a statement saying that complexity is growing as a demand for more elasticity increases which makes management of these applications increasingly difficult. This blog will be no exception, but there’s a good reason for that: we just enabled the first Sumo Logic customers with powerful new tools to tackle these exact challenges.

It’s been almost a year since I shared some thoughts about distributed tracing adoption strategies on this blog. We have discussed how different approaches between log vendors and application performance management (APM) vendors exist in the market and how important that is to allow users to analyze the data, including custom telemetry, the way they want.

Java Management Extensions, or JMX, was first added to J2EE, and it has been part of J2SE since the 5.0 release. The JMX API aims to provide a standard for monitoring and managing Java-enabled applications and services. In this article, we will explain the JMX architecture and show you how to pull the metrics that it generates into your Sumo Logic account in order to gain unique insights and a more thorough understanding of the health of your application and services.