The edge brings computing resources and data storage closer to end users, which explains the rapid boom in edge computing, but it also generates a huge amount of data. Edge computing is expected to grow to $445 billion by 2030, and according to IDC, 44% of organizations are investing in edge IT to create new customer experiences and improve engagement.

To achieve those goals, edge services observability should be a centerpoint of that investment. Otherwise, how do you know if your edge devices are delivering the optimal quality of experience to end users?

How do you know if streaming video is buffering or if data packets are dropped between the client and edge worker?

Can you see the versions and status of those edge workers?

Can you quickly pinpoint the origins of DDOS attacks, or analyze patterns that suggest piracy of your streams?

Without edge services observability, you can't.

40% of organizations say that the quality and timeliness of mission-critical data insights are the most important metrics to their company leadership. Edge services observability provides those kinds of insights. It gives you visibility into the performance, security, and overall health of edge devices, no matter where they are distributed in the world.

With edge services observability, you can see and mitigate both small and big issues before they escalate, and in return build better end user relationships and retain more loyal customers.

So what steps can you take to find the right edge services observability solution so that you can maintain smooth daily operations, deliver the best quality of experience, stop cyber threats, increase customer loyalty, and grow your business?

Let's take a look at five qualities that an edge services observability solution should have.

1. Data scalability

According to IDC, in 2023 more than half organizations expected that the amount of operational data they are using would grow by up to 30%. Other reports show that nearly 403 million terabytes of data are created each day, around 147 zettabytes of data will be generated this year, and 181 zettabytes of data will be generated in 2025, with videos accounting for more than half of internet data traffic (and videos generate a lot of log data). You need an edge services observability platform that can handle that much data, and easily scale as data grows. That means finding a platform that doesn’t slow down or crash as log volumes grow, and even better, compresses data to make long-term storage affordable and viable.

2. Immediate alerting

The sooner you can pinpoint issues, the faster you can mitigate them. Any downtime can impact the productivity, brand, reputation and revenue of your business. The average cost of a critical outage can be $300,000 per hour, according to BMC. To spare your organization a damaging outage or other events that could cause you to lose business, look for an edge services observability platform that alerts on issues immediately after data is ingested. With real-time alerting comes real-time mitigation so you can fix issues before they escalate.

3. Data retention

Between storage capacity growth, egress fees, and API call charges, data storage can cost a fortune. One study found that more than half of IT decision makers exceed their cloud storage budgets. Another study found that 68% of IT managers report storage costs as their main pain point and that budgets aren’t keeping pace with the ever-increasing amount of data. The escalating costs have forced companies to make painful choices such as discarding or sampling data. Yet, it’s important to have extended retention with all your data available for querying, mainly for root cause analysis of incidents, data-driven business decisions that require trending data, investigations, and fulfilling compliance requirements. That’s why when looking for an edge services observability platform, it’s critical to find one with an affordable long-term retention policy (one year or more). When you find one, you can say goodbye to sampling and discarding data because you can keep all of it.

4. Hot storage

You may have already experienced challenges querying large datasets with other observability solutions. Querying large or older data sets takes hours, sometimes days. With so many edge devices connecting to the network from all over the world, it’s critical to pinpoint issues and their origin immediately. You need access to all of your data at any point in time, which means you need an edge services observability platform that keeps data always hot, not cold. When data remains hot, you can query it in sub-seconds, and significantly reduce the mean time to remediate (MTTR). On the other hand, cold data takes much longer to query if it's even queryable at all.

5. Easy set-up

Deploying any service can be a headache. It may require in-house resources and time, both of which you may prefer to dedicate to other business initiatives. Edge services observability platforms don’t have to come with a laborious, resource-sucking deployment. A managed service requires minimal resources and deployment can take less than twenty minutes.

The right edge services observability solution is not just a nice-to-have — it's a necessity. By prioritizing data scalability, immediate alerting, extended data retention, hot storage, and ease of deployment, you can ensure your edge infrastructure is always optimized for performance and resilience. Investing in a scalable, cost-effective observability platform will empower your organization to deliver unparalleled user experiences, safeguard your operations, and drive long-term business growth. Choose wisely, and you'll be well-equipped to navigate the complexities of edge computing with confidence.