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The Observability Practices Expected to Power Digital Business

By Erez Barak, VP of Product Development for Observability, Sumo Logic

The data problem is getting worse as the opportunities provided by digital technology and data analysis expand. This is forcing the world of observability to transform; transition to more automated and intelligent platforms and converge with security. Leaders and practitioners of digital businesses will adopt new and old observability solutions in 2023 to deliver secure and reliable digital experiences, bring security and observability together, and scale their growth companies in complex, cloud-based environments. 

Observability Can Encompass What Makes a Good Customer Experience

There are many facets to the digital experience, which is a subset of observability. Companies can now detect issues before they impact the user through end-user monitoring of the application running on a user's device, synthetic testing to emulate user access from around the world, and coordinating that information with how the backend, cloud microservices, and data stores are performing. With customer experience now commonly an application or a web page, observability will show organizations what is effective, efficient and what can result in a good customer experience.

APM Isn't Dead - Just Different

While application performance monitoring (APM) is dead or dying in its current state and as a stand-alone market, but it's still useful and necessary for technology practitioners because of the growing digitization. Rather than the old way of transaction tracing, which no longer works in a distributed system, the future of APM includes tracing, OpenTelemetry, microservices and more. APM grew from an on-premise environment, so with mobile applications running everywhere, observability can be considered the new APM.

APM and Observability Use Cases Will Emerge

As these technologies converge, use cases and applications will begin to overlap. Engineers won't have to waste time jumping between applications. Formerly disparate applications can now be combined in a platform where users can detect, troubleshoot and resolve issues in a unified environment. This includes real-time user monitoring, which can now track clicks on applications as well as identify poor-performing applications and websites. Fortunately, organizations that haven't implemented APM due to costs can also use logs and other techniques in a similar fashion. As technologies combine, companies will use logs more to get insights into customer behavior.

Prepare for Everything-as-Code and Convergence of Security and Observability

Everything is becoming applications and code, meaning automation will be everywhere. Developers will have more control and manageability over applications and tools, so there will be increasing demand for APIs everywhere to enable everything possible to be as-code.

With developers leading this trend, organizational needs will also change. There will no longer be a need to use and pay for a security tool and observability tool to manage data. Rather, vendors will help practitioners detect problems earlier and fix problems faster by converging security products with observability.

SLOs Become Necessary for Observability

To cope with the cloud, practitioners need to toss legacy reliability monitoring and the manual, spreadsheet approach. A reliability management program is about having insights through service level objectives (SLOs) for better visibility into application and system performance. With this level of insight, teams can reach the best cadence of new feature releases, maintain optimal application and system stability, and track error budgets. Reliability Management has emerged as a key factor in driving innovation and business outcomes that focuses on the reliability of the application from the end user perspective instead of monitoring and alerting across all of the infrastructure, services and application components involved in the response.

OpenTelemetry to Gain Momentum

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is an open-source observability platform that allows engineers to collect telemetry, logs and trace data using a single platform. Platform users can be less technical so that organizations can adapt to related talent shortages, and vendors can bring their data and analytics to it to solve problems. OTel is the first time an industry has actively moved away from proprietary measurements of code. With this, OTel simplifies collection by converging multiple data types.

Data is going to continue to grow and grow, putting stress on processes and resources. To tackle these challenges, observability solutions will need to simplify and automate. They will help environments learn, reduce false positives, self-heal, and detect insights to drive company growth.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Erez Barak is VP of Product Development for Observability at Sumo Logic. Prior to Sumo Logic, Erez was part of the Microsoft Azure team working on the AI platform and managing the Azure Machine Learning service. Previously, he co-founded a marketing automation company (acquired by Adobe). He also held multiple engineering and PM roles at Mercury Interactive.