Piercing the Fog: Observability Tools from the Future
InfoQ Homepage Articles Piercing the Fog: Observability Tools from the Future
As more enterprises adopt microservice architectures, they soon find that the services forming their applications are scattered across many machines. In such a highly distributed environment, gaining visibility into those systems and how they are performing resembles hunting for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Fortunately we can turn to observability to make our systems visible.
Why do we need visibility into systems? There are three main answers: system reliability, compliance, and insights into growth drivers. Although in theory all three are possible, as of now observability is primarily used for site reliability, since both compliance and growth driver tools have their own means for collecting data and rarely tap into observability data. Once there is more extensive standardization on data collection specifications, it is likely that all three types of tools will use observability data.
For this article, we will focus on site reliability. Observability helps site reliability teams by providing the data and insights they need to quickly troubleshoot and fix issues or even proactively stop issues from happening in the first place.
