Observability is no longer a mere buzzword; it has become a vital component in ensuring the success of any enterprise. First and foremost, it's crucial to acknowledge that there's no such thing as an application that never fails, and we must effectively deal with failures.
Macro Customer Trends
Before delving into observability, let's explore some macro customer trends. Customers seek ways to respond efficiently to situations by gaining visibility into their infrastructure and applications. Their focus extends beyond ensuring that Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are met; they aim to provide an optimal user experience, as reflected in their Service Level Objectives (SLOs). For instance, while a website may be technically operational, the user experience might be slow. Therefore, even if the SLA for website uptime is green, the SLO for user experience is red.
Customers are also keen on understanding the precise cause and timing of incidents, aiming for visibility to ensure that applications perform as intended. Their goals include enhancing infrastructure efficiency and reducing operational costs. How do they achieve this? They have developed a global monitoring and observability strategy, adopting a proactive approach to incident management. Utilizing cutting-edge tools, they are modernizing their application monitoring and observability. Furthermore, they streamline their existing monitoring tools by integrating AWS observability services, reducing operational burdens and contributing to cost-effectiveness.
What is observability?
Observability describes how well you can understand what's happening in your system, and this can be achieved by using tools to collect information, such as metrics, logs, and traces. Understanding how your systems function to achieve operational excellence and align with business objectives is important. Observability equips you with the capability to detect, investigate, and remediate issues, thereby enhancing operational availability and reducing the Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). Understanding the potential cost of an operational failure to business highlights the crucial role observability plays. The goal is to detect, investigate, and remediate problems as fast as possible, ultimately minimizing the MTTR.
Detection: Customers often don't notice issues as soon as they arise. There's usually a delay between the start of an issue and when notified about it. Minimizing this delay is crucial. Detection should be proactive and multifaceted. Anomaly detection is a valuable tool, along with the ability to connect related alarms to reduce alarm fatigue. Responding to failures becomes faster when alerts are triggered close to the source of telemetries.
Investigation: During an operational event, a significant amount of time is spent on the investigation, contributing to extended downtime and a longer MTTR. Navigating through the chaos and determining what to prioritize remains a challenging task for many customers. They use logs, metrics, and traces to understand the root cause swiftly. The crucial aspect is correlating data across metrics, logs, and traces. Time is valuable, and focusing on critical matters during an operational event is essential.
Remediation: After identifying the cause of the failure, the next step involves remediation. This could include fixing, patching, or rolling back changes. Prioritizing automation in your deployments and changes is essential to prevent making the situation worse when resolving issues. Conduct a post-event analysis to understand how the failure could have been prevented in the first place. Modify your code to avoid the same issue from occurring again. However, even if it does happen, you should have mechanisms to identify and remediate automatically.
Foundation for observability: data drives decisions
The basis of observability comprises metrics, logs, and traces. However, it's the data derived from these sources that guides your business decisions. Logs, metrics, and traces are all equally vital, serving as key components for observability. They play a crucial role in maintaining SLAs by enabling the detection, investigation, and remediation of problems. This, in turn, ensures the availability, reliability, and performance of your infrastructure and applications.
Full-stack observability strategies
An effective observability strategy needs to align with your business objectives. Ensure that your goals and approach to observability are centered on your SLOs. This approach will guide you in identifying the crucial signals to reduce your MTTR and successfully establish a comprehensive full-stack observability solution.
Let's examine methods to determine which signals to monitor.
Outside-In
When employing an outside-in approach, the initial focus is on establishing what appears to end users. It considers tasks such as monitoring web page response times, ensuring the completion of customer shopping carts, and identifying any encountered errors. Some SLOs can be monitored to measure these aspects. For instance, tracking page load times, ensuring successful completion of purchases, and evaluating the conversion rate for new customer acquisitions. All these metrics are tied to end-user behavior and performance, and leveraging these signals in building your SLOs is essential.
Inside-Out
In an inside-out approach, the starting point is establishing what constitutes a healthy state for your backend applications. This involves monitoring aspects such as slow queries to your database, the overall integration health of your infrastructure, or, in the case of modern applications, the health of your containers. These are some of the SLOs you should be monitoring: tracking query times for databases, CPU utilization, disk usage, API response times, and assessing error rates, faults, and retries. These metrics are internal-facing signals critical for effective monitoring. Next, you can integrate these signals to gain comprehensive business insights and measure your SLOs.
Why AWS observability?
AWS can assist you in gaining these insights, understanding the health of your applications and infrastructure, enhancing the performance and availability of your applications, and reducing operational costs through fully managed services. This support is geared towards increasing customer satisfaction and elevating the end-user experience.
How AWS observability helps achieve your business goals?
AWS ensures that customers have an exceptional observability experience, regardless of the service they use—whether it's AWS observability services or partner services. AWS observability offers end-to-end solutions, meeting diverse needs from out-of-the-box observability to cross-account observability. This includes streamlining data collection and logins and addressing open-source requirements. For instance, Amazon CloudWatch offers a zero-touch management approach. You can get data by utilizing CloudWatch or OpenTelemetry agents, and AWS takes care of the rest. AWS automatically scales to manage your data retention policies. Managing popular open-source tools like Prometheus and Grafana can be challenging. AWS's managed open-source observability services, including Amazon Managed Grafana and Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, help eliminate the burden associated with managing these tools. AWS's end-to-end observability empowers customers to monitor infrastructure and containers, cloud services, and underlying resources. This, in turn, enhances user experience, improves application performance, helps achieve SLOs, and contributes to cost optimization.
AWS Observability: Monitoring at scale
AWS designed their flagship observability service, Amazon CloudWatch, initially to address internal application challenges rather than for external customers. Internal teams at Amazon use CloudWatch for their observability requirements. Over the years, AWS has developed new CloudWatch features to tackle its internal observability challenges. Later, AWS transforms these capabilities into services for their customers. CloudWatch has evolved from monitoring infrastructure since the start of Amazon EC2 in 2009 to encompassing applications and end-user monitoring. In recent years, AWS has also expanded its services to manage open-source solutions.
Currently, millions of AWS customers utilize AWS observability services. Additionally, AWS collaborates and integrates with a wide range of third-party observability providers and cloud management tools to ensure an optimal experience for their customers. Amazon CloudWatch, for example, monitors over 11 quadrillion metric observations and ingests more than six exabytes of logs.
AWS Observability: Powerful choice for your observability needs
AWS recognizes the importance of observability for organizations of all sizes and across various industries, irrespective of their infrastructure model – on-premise, hybrid, or multi-cloud. Observability is essential for informed decision-making and achieving desired outcomes, whether you are monitoring networks, infrastructures, applications, containers, or devices. It all begins with the sources and workloads you bring to the table. The data originates from over 120 AWS services and spans various other sources across on-premises, hybrid, multi-cloud, or containerized workloads. In the era of microservices and containers, resource deployment is seamless, and data is generated from diverse sources such as workloads, IoT sensors, and factory floors.
AWS collects both open-source and AWS-native data. Once collected, the data is enriched to be used for monitoring applications and systems, providing valuable context for effective observability. This approach ensures that your data works for you. AWS offers robust data insights and analytics capabilities, including aggregations, dashboarding, alarming, analysis, insights, correlation, and more.
In summary, this approach provides end-to-end observability, covering the journey from your end users to your applications. Observability is the key if you want to enhance the customer experience by increasing reliability, ensuring availability, maintaining SLOs, or expediting root cause analysis. Observability allows you to understand the dynamics within your application and helps you drive your business decisions.
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