Cloud computing

Understanding Observability: From Zero to Hero

Amulya's photo
Amulya
·

2 min read

Introduction

In today's complex software systems, understanding what's happening inside your applications is crucial. This comprehensive guide will explore observability, its importance, and how it differs from traditional monitoring approaches.

What is Observability?

Observability is the ability to understand the internal state of your system by examining its outputs. It encompasses:

  • The complete application stack

  • Infrastructure components

  • Networking elements

A well-implemented observability solution helps you answer three critical questions:

  1. WHAT is happening in your system?

  2. WHY is it happening?

  3. HOW can you fix it?

The Three Pillars of Observability

1. Metrics

  • Provides historical data about system events

  • Tracks performance indicators over time

  • Examples include:

    • CPU utilization

    • Memory usage

    • Disk utilization

    • HTTP request success/failure rates

2. Logging

  • Offers detailed information about specific events

  • Different types: info, debug, error, and trace logs

  • Helps understand the context of issues

  • Essential for debugging and troubleshooting

3. Tracing

  • Tracks request flow through distributed systems

  • Shows complete request journey (e.g., from load balancer → frontend → backend → database)

  • Measures timing between service interactions

  • Identifies bottlenecks and performance issues

Observability vs. Monitoring

While often confused, these concepts are distinct:

  • Monitoring focuses primarily on metrics (one pillar)

  • Monitoring typically includes alerts and dashboards

  • Observability is more comprehensive, incorporating all three pillars

  • Observability provides deeper insights into system behavior

Real-World Use Case: The SLA Challenge

Consider a Resume Builder SaaS application:

  1. Company promises customers:

    • 99.9% platform availability

    • 99.99% of requests respond within 30ms

    • 200 HTTP status codes for successful requests

  2. Observability helps:

    • Track SLA compliance

    • Identify potential issues before they breach SLAs

    • Provide quick feedback for remediation

    • Maintain customer trust and satisfaction

Implementation Responsibilities

Observability requires collaboration between:

Developers

  • Instrument application code

  • Implement metrics collection

  • Configure logging

  • Enable tracing capabilities

DevOps/SRE Engineers

  • Set up monitoring infrastructure

  • Configure logging platforms

  • Implement tracing solutions

  • Create and maintain dashboards

  • Configure alerting systems

  1. Metrics:

    • Prometheus

    • Grafana (visualization)

  2. Logging:

    • EFK Stack (Elasticsearch, Fluent Bit, Kibana)

    • ELK Stack

  3. Tracing:

    • Jaeger

    • OpenTelemetry

Conclusion

Observability is not just a technical requirement but a business necessity in modern software development. It helps organizations maintain high-quality services, meet SLAs, and quickly resolve issues before they impact users. The key to successful observability implementation lies in the collaborative effort between development and operations teams, supported by the right tools and practices.

Observability vs. MonitoringobservabilitymonitoringDevopsmetricsloggingtracing