Why Observability Matters in the Cloud and How AWS Ensures It
Observability systems collect and analyze data from applications and infrastructure to give teams an accurate understanding of what is occurring in real time. Here’s a look at how observability works and how AWS ensures it.
The deployment of distributed infrastructure across public, hybrid, and edge clouds increases complexity, and observability is key to troubleshooting errors and simplifying processes. However, a lack of observability continues to be among the top concerns for IT professionals. Let’s understand what observability is, why it is essential in a distributed environment, and how AWS offers enhanced observability to enterprise customers.
Seeing is believing. That’s the old saying we grew up hearing. When you’re in charge of managing or securing something, visibility is essential. In the traditional on-premise data center era, visibility was reasonably straightforward. The data center offered a complete, visible overview of all your physical devices. When all your applications were server-based, a simple scan of the server event viewer and log files gave you the needed information.
Complexity Breeds the Need for Greater Visibility
The complexity of today’s hybrid cloud enterprises makes visibility a lot more challenging today. It’s more than just the fact that resources now exist in the cloud in multi-tenant environments. Businesses and their customers are far more reliant on IT services than even a decade ago, so minimizing downtime and optimizing workloads is critical. Some of the other contributing factors include:
- The containerization of applications
- The shift towards a microservices architecture
- The exponential growth of edge computing
- The continual release of new code by software vendors
- Companies must support a combination of both legacy and modern-day equipment
Earlier, applications used to be hosted on an assigned server, so it was easy to correlate troubleshooting efforts. IT is becoming less deterministic in today’s environment, where applications are now distributed across large-scale IT estates. The non-deterministic nature of distributed systems means greater uncertainty as to what may be happening within your product environment at any given moment.
Defining Observability
So, what does observability really mean? Isn’t monitoring the same thing? Gartner defines it as an evolution of monitoring into a process that offers insight into digital business applications and speeds innovation, thereby enhancing the customer experience. This is attained using application performance management software. According to the IDC, the APM market was worth more than $5 billion in 2020.
Observability goes further than mere monitoring. While monitoring will alert your team when a system isn’t working, observability goes deeper and helps them understand why it isn’t working. APM observability systems, however, use monitoring along with logs, traces, and AI. Observability systems collect and analyze data from applications and infrastructure to give teams an accurate understanding of what is occurring in real-time. These solutions can either be internally hosted, offered as a vendor-managed solution or accessible via SaaS.
See More: How Data Observability Can Help Companies Win The Data Race
Little things matter
Choice begets competition. In online retailing, consumers have multiple digital storefronts to choose from, so ensuring an enhanced online experience for shoppers is imperative. An online retailer can lose a potential shopper by the mere presence of a 404-browser error. In another example, the real reason the online sales for a company may be slowly deteriorating may not have anything to do with the product portfolio or pricing but instead linked to how slow the product pages load onto a user’s computer. Decreased performance equates to a diminished user experience, leading to waning sales.
In the same way that the manager of a traditional brick-and-mortar retail store had to focus on all aspects of the store experience, companies have in-depth visibility into all nuances of their ecommerce backend systems. By spotting problems before they have a chance to disrupt the customer experience, teams can respond quickly and resolve them before things get worse. In the same way that drivers and mechanics rely on sensory data output and logging systems to understand the root problems of what is going on under the hood, IT teams need observability solutions to gain insight into what is going on at all locations of the enterprise including the farthest edge as well as private and public clouds.
Tackling the observability problem
Today, many solutions enable businesses to enhance the observability of their cloud assets. However, many organizations continue to bear the consequences of a lack of observability owing to several reasons.
For instance, research by cloud infrastructure services provider Platform9 revealed that security, consistent management across environments, high availability, and observability were the top concerns of technology professionals for operating cloud-native technologies. The deployment of distributed infrastructure across public, hybrid, and edge clouds increases complexity, said Bhaskar Gorti, CEO of Platform9. He noted that when implementing a distributed cloud strategy, many businesses fail to anticipate the challenges of managing it efficiently and the high skill level needed to do so.
Etay Maor, senior director of security strategy at Cato Networks, said that one of the underlying issues is that when companies strive to move to the cloud, they do so with an “on-prem” mindset and a stack of point solutions that make the transformation cumbersome to complete and manage.
“Hybrid environments present a challenge both on the strategic level as well as the tactical and operational levels. Integration, availability, management and monitoring of multiple point solutions are challenging for any organization while providing threat actors with a wide attack surface with many “dark areas” that organizations may not even be aware of,” Maor said.
To address these challenges, he opined, organizations should adopt SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) as their go-to architecture and strategy as it addresses these concerns in today’s evolving hybrid environments.
See More: Cutover Delivers Remote IT Work Orchestration and Observability to AWS Marketplace Users
How does AWS ensure enhanced observability?
With the need for complete visibility of your cloud environment, it only made sense that the largest cloud computing provider offers observability packages. Amazon Web Services announced the general availability of its DevOps Guru platform just over a year ago. DevOps Guru is a fully managed operations service that utilizes machine learning that aids IT teams in detecting operational issues and remediation actions to deal with them. It looks for anomalies that deviate from normal operating patterns across 25 AWS resources using various data sources, including application metrics, logs, events, and traces.
Less than 12 months later, AWS announced a strategic partnership with Dynatrace. The partnership offers organizations easy access to the Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform through the AWS Marketplace.
The platform will support more than 100 AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Kubernetes. AWS currently offers a growing line of observability tools, including AWS CloudTrail, Amazon Cloud Watch, and AWS X-Ray Traces.
In only a year, AWS has made a footprint in the application and infrastructure observability market, and data observability is the next logical step. There’s no doubt that AWS and other cloud companies will expand their portfolio of observability offerings in the coming years.
Does your organization enjoy complete visibility into all of its cloud assets? Comment below or let us know on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. We would love to hear from you!
