Observability
Distributed tracing has been growing in popularity as a primary tool for investigating performance issues in microservices systems. Our recent DevOps Pulse survey shows a 38% increase year-over-year in organizations' tracing use. Furthermore, 64% of those respondents who are not yet using tracing indicated plans to adopt it in the next two years ...
When a website or app fails or falters, the standard operating procedure is to assemble a sizable team to quickly "divide and conquer" to find a solution. The details of the problem can usually be found somewhere among millions of log events and metrics, leading to slow and painstaking searches that can take hours and often involve handoffs between experts in different areas of the software. The immediate goal in these situations is not to be comprehensive, but rather to troubleshoot until you find a solution that remedies the symptom, even if the underlying root cause is not addressed ...
While 90% of respondents believe observability is important and strategic to their business — and 94% believe it to be strategic to their role — just 26% noted mature observability practices within their business, according to the 2021 Observability Forecast ...
DevOps, SRE and other operations teams use observability solutions with AIOps to ingest and normalize data to get visibility into tech stacks from a centralized system, reduce noise and understand the data's context for quicker mean time to recovery (MTTR). With AI using these processes to produce actionable insights, teams are free to spend more time innovating and providing superior service assurance. Let's explore AI's role in ingestion and normalization, and then dive into correlation and deduplication too ...
As we look into the future direction of observability, we are paying attention to the rise of artificial intelligence, machine learning, security, and more. I asked top industry experts — DevOps Institute Ambassadors — to offer their predictions for the future of observability. The following are 10 predictions ...
After more than a year of accelerated innovation, and without the tools and insights to effectively manage technology performance, many IT departments are struggling. The Agents of Transformation 2021 research brought home exactly how hard the last 12 months have hit technologists ...
Recent AppDynamics research, Agents of Transformation 2021: The Rise of Full-Stack Observability, found that the speed of implementation for digital transformation programs in financial services has increased by three times over the past year, compared to pre-pandemic levels. This is particularly concerning since the financial services sector has historically led the way with digitization and been particularly innovative in the digital experiences it offers customers ...
The average "lifespan" of a company on the Fortune 500 list has dropped from 75 to 15 years, indicating that today, a business' longevity is less to do with industrial decline and leadership, and more influenced by technology and trends, suggesting businesses need to be more agile. As digital transformation continues to change business today, innovative technology like observability with AIOps will play a critical role in helping brands keep up. And as more and more brands implement this innovative technology, there are three main ways they'll see it transform their business ...
Anti-patterns involve realizing a problem and implementing a non-optimal solution that is broadly embraced as the go-to method for solving that problem. This solution sounds good in theory, but for one reason or another it is not the best means of solving the problem. Anti-patterns are common across IT as well, especially around application monitoring and observability. One that is particularly prevalent is in response to the increasing complexity of cloud-native infrastructure and applications ...
SREs that fail to deliver customer value run the risk of being stuck in an operational toil rut. Conversely, businesses failing to recognize the bi-modal nature and importance of SRE activities run the risk of losing talented employees and their competitive edge ...
When you see distressing internet outages occur like the recent Fastly incident that threw a slew of websites offline, I am never surprised by how widespread the problem was, but paradoxically that it wasn't worse ...
With every organization now being a digital organization, observability should be viewed as a core competency, not a cutting-edge differentiator, according to The State of Observability 2021, a report from Splunk ...
More than half (61%) of respondents reported that their teams are practicing observability, an 8% increase from 2020, signaling that overall adoption is on the rise, according to a 2021 survey from Honeycomb. However, the majority of respondents indicated their teams are at the earliest stages of observability maturity ...
As we have seen during this digital transformation boom during the pandemic, technologists are managing more applications and data than ever before, which has led three quarters of technologists to be concerned with increased IT complexity. Even more significant, 89% admitted to feeling under immense pressure to keep up with the churn, according to the recent AppDynamics Agents of Transformation report. It's clear that the pandemic has pushed many technologists to their breaking point. To help tackle IT burnout, tech professionals need a "canary" to help them streamline and catch the anomalies before they cause any major performance issues ...
Kubernetes is rapidly becoming the standard for cloud and on-premises clusters, according to the 2021 Kubernetes & Big Data Report from Pepperdata ...
Developers are getting better at building software, but we're not getting better at fixing it. The problem is that fixing bugs and errors is still a very manual process ... That's because traditional observability tools will tell you if your infrastructure is having problems, but don't provide the context a developer needs to fix the code or how to prioritize them based on business requirements. Also, traditional observability tools produce far too much noise and too many false positives, leading to alert fatigue ...
After making a quick pivot to increase focus on their digital strategies, companies are now looking for ways to improve efficiency and ensure their organization's long-term success. Notably, full-stack observability has been a common need across the industry — our report uncovered about three quarters of technologists recognize that the inability to connect full-stack observability with business outcomes will be detrimental to their business in 2021 ...
In today's complex, dynamic IT environments, the proliferation of disparate IT Ops, NOC, DevOps, and SRE teams and tools is a given — and usually considered a necessity. This leads to the inevitable truth that when an incident happens, often the biggest challenge is collaborating between these teams to understand what happened and resolve the issue. Inefficiencies suffered during this critical stage can have huge impacts on how much each incident costs the business ...
Cloud-based innovations like microservices, containers and orchestration let developers code better, faster, but the underlying infrastructure becomes dynamic and ephemeral, and service-level interactions are hard to see. It’s a critical evolution, but the rapid change reduces visibility, predictability and control. Hence, observability ...
Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2021. Part 2 covers APM and Observability ...
As we reflect on the last year and begin to plan for the future, we expect to see trends like prioritization of the user experience and the dependence on IT teams continue, recognizing that what worked yesterday, may not work today or in the near future ...
Organizations around the world are facing heightened pressure to accelerate their digital transformation, as their customers, competitors, and business stakeholders all recognize doing so is no longer a company strategy, but a matter of survival. At the same time, these organizations are experiencing an equally difficult counter-pressure resulting from this transformation: complex multicloud environments and a growing inability to manage them ...
APMdigest posed the following question to the IT Operations community: How should ITOps adapt to the new normal? In response, industry experts offered their best recommendations for how ITOps can adapt to this new remote work environment. Part 4 covers monitoring and visibility ...
Enterprise ITOM and ITSM teams have been welcoming of AIOps, believing that it has the potential to deliver great value to them as their IT environments become more distributed, hybrid and complex. Not so with DevOps teams. It's safe to say they've kept AIOps at arm's length, because they don't think it's relevant nor useful for what they do. Instead, to manage the software code they develop and deploy, they've focused on observability ...
The post-pandemic environment has resulted in a major shift on where SREs will be located, with nearly 50% of SREs believing they will be working remotely post COVID-19, as compared to only 19% prior to the pandemic, according to the 2020 SRE Survey Report from Catchpoint and the DevOps Institute ...
