Observability allows organizations to examine the internal state of their complex systems using their outputs. If a system is observable, its current state can be measured using information obtained from its output.
The term originated from control theory. It is now used in improving and measuring the health of systems. Observability relies on three types of data. These include traces, logs, and metrics.
They provide visibility into complex systems and allow teams to understand and troubleshoot issues affecting the system’s performance. So, what is the importance of observability in complex systems?
Why is Observability Important in Complex Systems?
As discussed above, observability in systems is required throughout the entire business stack to improve the performance of systems. It gives organizations control over their complex systems.
If you look at simple systems, you will realize they have fewer moving parts than complex ones. This makes it easy for organizations to manage simple systems. All that organizations need to do is to monitor networking, databases, memory, and CPU.
The same cannot be said about complex systems. They have many moving parts, and the number of issues that might affect their performance is also high. This requires a good observability solution. Here are a few reasons for observability in complex systems;
Improves Visibility
Developers handle many tasks in an organization. In addition to this, they are supposed to understand how a complex system looked before making changes, the owner of every service, and the performance of their applications.
They are also supposed to track all services that are currently under production. This is because of the complexity of the systems they deal with. Fortunately, observability allows them to get real-time visibility into the complex systems. This helps them troubleshoot any issues to improve the performance of the systems.
Observability Improves Workflow
Complex systems have many interconnected parts that send thousands of requests to each other to address the needs of the system users. Developers should track each request, from the source to the destination, and its response.
They are also required to check contextualized data, especially when there are issues with the complex system. They cannot achieve this without observability. With improved workflow, developers can quickly investigate and debug any issues and improve the performance of their systems.
Provides Better Alerting
As discussed above, developers get better and real-time visibility into complex systems using visibility solutions. This is important for them to quickly find issues and fix them to ensure that complex systems do what they are supposed to do.
With such visibility, they can get alerts when there are issues. In addition, they can see any changes to their systems, troubleshoot and fix them before they affect system performance. They can also see any changes that might be caused by those issues.
In addition, they can get alerts immediately after security breaches. This allows them to deal with emerging cybersecurity challenges.
Accelerates Development Speed
Observability and monitoring are used together. However, it is important to note that a system has to be observable for it to be monitored. This means that observability improves the monitoring of complex systems.
This ensures that developers understand their complex systems better and know everything required to improve performance. When they are required to build a new functionality or system, they take less time since they know what they are supposed to do.
Saves Time
Before observability, organizations and their developers spent a lot of time understanding their complex systems. They used third-party service providers for their development needs.
Developers had to talk with these service providers in case of issues or when they wanted to make changes to their systems. Observability has changed this. They can easily understand how their complex systems work and fix issues without involving third parties. This helps them save time.
Helps Improve User Experience
No matter how good your system is, you will always have issues to fix. This means that you need to be on the lookout all the time for any issues that might affect the performance of your complex systems.
Imagine a situation where you have not detected issues with your systems. However, users report the issue due to the poor performance of the system. This is going to affect their confidence in the system. Fortunately, you can avoid such a situation with observability and improve the experience of your users.
Observability is Crucial
Observability is one of the most important things when running complex systems. Since systems can fail, you need a solution that helps you track and monitor their health. This makes it possible for you to fix any issues affecting performance. You cannot do this without observability.