Articles about observability

A new report from Grafana Labs looks at the maturity and evolution of the observability landscape, from the complex challenges teams are facing to the tools and tactics they're implementing to overcome them.

The study, based on 1,255 responses, shows 75 percent of respondents are now using open source licensing for observability into software performance, with 70 percent reporting that their organizations use both Prometheus and OpenTelemetry in some capacity. Half of all organizations have increased their investments in both technologies for the second year in a row.

Continue reading →

In DevOps and IT circles, the word 'observability' has been bandied about for the past few years. Observability is one of those hot and trendy terms which also means different things to different people.

Yet the goal is generally the same: how can we observe our environment and then proactively and even automatically make fixes to things that aren't working, are anomalous, suspicious and/or could potentially cause a disastrous outcome? Such outcomes could include a network failure, a security breach, a server reaching capacity, or in the unstructured data management world -- something else entirely.

Continue reading →

This year, embracing a leading observability practice will not only be a key priority for organizations but an essential competitive differentiator. Recent data shows that leading organizations with mature observability practices spend 38 percent more of their time on innovation, in contrast with organizations early on in their observability journey. This greater amount of time to focus on product innovation can equate to significant benefits for an organization, such as increased developer productivity, improved operational efficiency and more importantly winning market share.

2024 has shown us that the impact and business value of observability is expanding. It is evolving from a reactive practice to a proactive one where organizations not only use observability for troubleshooting issues but now also to inform their customer experience strategy and to fuel faster innovation.

Continue reading →

As we head further into 2025, organizations must focus on bolstering operational resilience and addressing third-party risks, driven not only by commercial imperatives but also by new regulatory mandates. With the enactment of regulations such as NIS2 in late 2024 and DORA early this year, supply chain risk management is now a strategic necessity.

This means that third-party cyber risk management must become a strategic priority. However, according to BlueVoyant’s fifth annual Supply Chain Defence report, which examines fast-evolving supply ecosystems, many organizations don’t appear to be prioritizing supply chain cyber risk management, or are unaware of cyber security gaps in their supply chains.

Continue reading →

The last few years have seen digital transformation dramatically increase the sprawl and complexity of enterprise IT environments. Today, the average employee will likely access a dozen applications before lunchtime, both in the cloud and on-prem. This increased complexity has simultaneously created greater interdependences between applications, while also making visibility much trickier for IT teams. 

The upshot of this is a world where there are more applications in use, which are less able to be monitored, and causing greater frustration when they experience issues. This is not a recipe for success.

Continue reading →

As the IT landscape becomes more complex it can be difficult for businesses to fully understand their risk profile and to ensure that they're getting the most from their investments.

With the launch of a new AI-powered unified observability platform, Kloudfuse aims to deliver improved anomaly detection and consolidated metrics, logs, traces, real user monitoring, continuous profiling, and more in a unified observability data lake.

Continue reading →

A new report from Splunk looks at the role of observability within today's increasingly complex IT environments.

Based on a survey of 1,850 ITOps and developer professionals, it finds enterprises with good observability resolve issues faster, boost developer productivity, control costs and improve customer satisfaction. Due to such benefits, 86 percent of all respondents plan to increase their observability investments.

Continue reading →

Let's begin with a math problem -- please solve for “X.” Network Observability = Monitoring + X.

The answer is “Context.” Network observability is monitoring plus context. Monitoring can tell the NetOps team that a problem exists, but observability tells you why it exists. Observability gives the Network Operations (NetOps) team real-time, actionable insights into the network’s behavior and performance. This makes NetOps more efficient, which means lower MTTR, better network performance, less downtime, and ultimately better performance for the applications and business that depend on the network. As networks get more complex and IT budgets stay the same size, observability has become very important. In the past two years, I’ve heard the term used by engineers and practitioners on the ground much more often. Gartner predicted that the market for network observability tools will grow 15 percent from 2022 to 2027.

Continue reading →

Development teams are increasingly seen as the engine room of the modern digital enterprise, tasked with building the new services and capabilities that the business needs to thrive. However, with resources stretched to their limit, organizations must find a way to empower their developers to work more productively, so they can deliver newer, better digital capabilities faster and more reliably. If they fail to do so, it will be more difficult to keep pace with market demands, and many will see their competitors gain the advantage.

In response, organizations are increasingly adopting a shift left approach, to ensure that new code is tested earlier in the software development lifecycle (SDLC). This reduces the risk that code could contain errors or vulnerabilities that lead to delayed innovation, as applications or features are rolled back to be reworked by developers. But shift left should not be about moving extra work “left” in the SDLC, or demanding developers assume extra responsibilities. It should be about empowering developers to work smarter, by shifting all relevant information left. Developers should have all the insight they need, when they require it, to make better decisions.

Continue reading →

As cloud-based networks, mobility and the rise of hybrid work have spiked ongoing CIOs’ interest in observability, companies are forced to consider how observability factors into their daily systems and routines. To understand what’s happening between their applications, devices, and infrastructure – and how these affect employees -- companies must consider how monitoring and observability go hand in hand to improve their IT operations.

As any good CIO knows, observability is not just about where something is happening but why it’s happening, which helps them resolve network issues. By doing this, companies can better maintain a seamless digital experience that assists in some of their most critical initiatives, namely in heightening security, lowering their carbon footprint and improving overall employee morale.  

Continue reading →

A new study shows that in 2024, the biggest challenge to gaining observability into cloud-native environments -- cited by 48 percent of respondents -- is lack of knowledge among the team. This is up from 30 percent in 2023.

The report from Logz.io shows only 10 percent of organizations are utilizing full observability, that is, observing the real-time status of every component of the entire technology stack.

Continue reading →

Ensuring observability has always involved three pillars: logs, metrics and traces. However, the reality is that most organizations simply store this information in silos which are incapable of communicating with one another.

Jeremy Burton, CEO of Observe, believes organizations need to go beyond the three pillars of past failed solutions and instead view observability as purely a data problem. We talked to him to learn more.

Continue reading →

Observability is key to allowing organizations to manage their systems effectively, helping improve performance, cut workloads and save money.

Grafana has released its latest Obervability Survey, based on responses from over 300 industry practitioners which shows that 70 percent of teams are using four or more observability technologies.

Continue reading →

Companies have massively increased their cloud infrastructure investment in the relentless pursuit of innovation. Cloud-native apps, hybrid clouds, microservices, and serverless all enable companies to serve their customers with greater agility -- and at greater scale -- than ever before.

But the rapid adoption of these technologies has also created distributed cloud environments that are immensely difficult to understand and monitor with conventional observability tools.

Continue reading →

The developer talent gap is very real. According to IDC, there will be a global shortfall of four million developers by 2025. Other analyses are more dire, estimating the current shortage at 40 million developers worldwide and expected to reach more than 85 million by 2030.

While the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics currently indicates there are more than 1.6 million developers employed in the U.S., this number is expected to grow by 25 percent to more than two million by 2031, much faster than the average for all occupations. Despite this growth, developer demand is expected to exceed skills availability for many years to come. There are numerous causes for this, including the rapid growth of digital transformation, increasing software development complexity and more. But one thing is for certain - the fight for talent is going to be fierce, and it’s going to be essential for organizations to focus on keeping their developer talent happy and right where they are.

Continue reading →