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Communications, Media, & Tech | What is Observability?

Observability is understanding the full picture: there's something that's happening with your application landscape that's starting to impact your users, your clients, or your business.

And then observability is also the practice of being able to drill down into the data when something like that happens. You can tell what's going on, remediate it, which means quickly fix it, and then also put in a long-term solution so that it doesn't happen again.

A lot of organizations do monitoring, or Application Performance Monitoring. They're monitoring the infrastructure, monitoring compute, monitoring networking; basically they’re looking at the typical layers of the infrastructure (see figure below).

Where we want to take businesses is where they're monitoring from the outside-in; they're monitoring really mostly the layer between where their IT ends and their users connect, or where other businesses themselves connect to the application.

Looking user experience-inward also would allow organizations to drill down all the way past the compute layer, which is where most monitoring and IT Ops teams are doing their monitoring today. With a Full Stack Observability mindset and tooling, teams can also drill down all the way into the networking layer. This helps IT Ops teams understand if compute is their problem, if networking is their problem, or if it’s the application itself.

Or even further, is it a problem that I don't even own? It's a problem that might be outside of my perimeter via a third party API, for example.

But, the key is that the prioritization of issues and KPI management is based on how the issue hits the user experience and thus affects revenue, Customer Satisfaction/ Net Promoter Score, or (depending on the industry) operations such as shipping, logistics, manufacturing, or internal users of software.

Organizations typically struggle because there's a central area that provides the tooling and they provide training on the tooling. But there's not nearly enough dialogue into, ‘how do we do observability well’.

At Evolutio, we have a very strong recommendation for how companies should do observability well. And that really is focusing from the outside-in.

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Cell Phone Providers: the Reality

With such a massive cellular network, telecom and cell phone companies rely on distributed environments for revenue and happy phone users. Cell towers, networking, hardware, and virtual asset management ultimately ask the question: "Where is our stuff, and how is our stuff performing?" Hear CTO and Co-Founder of Evolutio, Laura Vetter, talk about access to the network, modernizing the user experience for customer-facing digital apps, and looking ahead to the future for capacity planning.

The number one outcome that we see is that mostly users and clients are calling in issues. And if you have one user calling it an issue, you have 10 users that aren't saying anything at all.

If they are having a large and persistent outage, they're finding out late. And when you find out you're having an outage late, it's very hard to tell what the root cause is.

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Evolutio can help you with your Observability initiatives and driving the cultural change for getting Site Reliability Engineering on the roadmap with your teams. Visit our Contact page to get in touch and learn more.