Observability is the practice of instrumenting systems with actionable tools to provide information about why errors and problems occur.
Monitoring provides instrumentation that gathers information about systems and allows them to respond quickly to errors and problems.
What is Full Stack Observability
A system is said to have Full Stack Observability because there are significant differentiators between different development teams, DevOps, business leaders, etc.
Modern architectures require a new approach to observability which depends on the impact that software teams can produce.
Currently, the following social trends exist:
- Pressure to innovate quickly.
Referring to the pressure to deliver new features and experiences to a fast-moving competitive market.
- High customer expectations
Customers expect more with less tolerance for errors leaving MTTD and MTTR to be evaluated for minimum time to action.
- The rise of automation
Every now and then, new tools and technologies appear. Automation is a synonym for "Everything is software and therefore repeatable-programmable".
Challenges of Full Stack Observability
Noting, from the above, the reality of facing great challenges that are driven by the existence of Full Stack Observability in a computer system.
1. Great complexities
Since a monolithic application can be divided into a dozen microservices, the teams face a complexity of scale, leaving the responsibility to the knowledge of some inheriting.
2. High risks
A frequency of deployment and a dynamic infrastructure, introduces a higher rate of risks which means in a monitoring and maintenance in deployment processes (through specialized tools or pipelines).
3. Technical debts
With the rise of containers and microservices, development teams face challenges related to the design, construction and deployment of applications, where each member must understand and be able to solve sections that are not at all familiar in a traditional development process.
4. Number of tools
Having hybrid environments, new ways of deployment and multiple requirements to solve day by day, results in a high volume of information telemetry to operate, changing between contexts and trying to be accurate and efficient in the act itself.
To achieve Full Stack Observability in our systems, we must be clear about 3 core elements:
- Single resource of truthNo important layer, collecting all the information in a single resource or destination will allow us to apply instrumentation where greater visibility is needed.
- Connecting and working contextUndertake with the MELT (Metrics-Events-Logs-Traces) concept.
- Data exploration and storageBy collecting and unifying information, it allows to reduce technical debt between the use of multiple tools.
Contribution created by: Emmanuel Rodriguez
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