Observability – The secret sauce for delivering a Resilient and Reliable IT system

With digital transformations at scale there is a sheer increase in the adoption of cloud-native applications microservices and distributed hybrid deployments. The technical complexity to build & deliver a resilient and reliable IT system has increased multi-fold in the recent years. Although the new-age distributed architectures provide increased scalability and flexibility to release application features rapidly the ability to perform root cause analysis to isolate the faults and fix the issues have become extremely difficult. Early & continuous observability is the secret sauce for delivering & sustaining a fault-tolerant reliable and high available system. Observability is a property and key characteristic of a modern IT system to expose details on the internal state of the system by generating external data such as metrics logs events & traces. An Observability tool provides the ability to collect real-time data monitor correlate analyse and visualize the hotspots to enhance the end-to-end visibility of the entire IT landscape. An Observability tool forms a vital toolkit for performing early Performance engineering and Chaos engineering as part of the CI/CD pipeline. This helps in adopting ‘Fail-Fast’ delivery culture by facilitating early feedbacks to development team and comply with Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) of the system. Continuous monitoring of the Service Level Objectives (SLO) Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Error budget is essential to control the velocity of the releases against the system reliability. A robust observability solution helps with monitoring of system availability and provides the ability to drill down and troubleshoot the issues. This helps in reducing the Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR). Thereby observability solution becomes crucial to meet the high availability targets and enhancing the customer experience.

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