Observability in business management is a key aspect of successful and efficient decision-making. With an observability-oriented platform, companies can have a real-time view of data and its behavior, allowing them to get the pulse of any digitized data point. If you want to learn more about how observability can transform your business, stay with us to the end.
What is observability?
The term “observability” refers to the ability to understand the internal state of a complex system based on the results that are observed.
The more observable a system is, the more accurate and faster the root cause of a performance problem can be found. This is a factor that suits today’s business management.
Within cloud services, observability also refers to the practices and tools used to collect, correlate and analyze performance data from a distributed application and the hardware on which it runs.
This enables effective monitoring, troubleshooting and debugging of the application to meet customer expectations, service level agreements and other business or business management requirements.
Although a relatively new term in IT, observability is often mistaken as an exaggerated term or a “rebranding” of system monitoring and application performance monitoring (APM).
In reality, observability is an evolution of APM data collection methods that improves monitoring in an increasingly distributed and dynamic environment. Especially in the execution of cloud-native applications.
Observability does not replace monitoring, but complements and enhances it. Where did this term applied to many business management services come from?
The term “observability” comes from engineering control theory, which is concerned with automating the control of a dynamic system through feedback.
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What is the difference between monitoring and observability?
Is observability just another name for monitoring? Not exactly. Although these two disciplines are closely related and can complement each other, they are actually distinct concepts.
Monitoring is based on the premise that control panels can be preconfigured to alert of future performance problems, assuming that the user can predict what kind of problems will arise.
We have seen this in enterprise management software where the performance of the computer network is monitored (efficiency, occurrence of failures, etc.). However, this approach is not applicable in dynamic and complex cloud environments.
Instead, observability focuses on fully instrumenting the environment to provide complete data and flexibly explore what is happening. This allows to quickly identify the cause of unpredictable problems.
Yuri Shkuro, author and software engineer at Uber Technologies, illustrates the difference as follows: monitoring is measuring what has been previously determined to be relevant, while observability is the ability to make queries on the system that were previously unknown.
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What is the importance of observability and why is it fashionable in business management?
Observability provides great business management benefits to IT departments, companies themselves and end users.
In this way, companies can correlate data, make decisions in real time and generate automated actions that will contribute to the evolution towards the concept of the autonomously managed enterprise. Observability is therefore a key tool for efficient and successful business management.
How do programming and software development innovate? Like cloud services, for example. Here is a short list:
Provides more comprehensive application performance monitoring
Observability makes it possible to quickly find application performance problems. An advanced observability solution can automate complex operational processes, increasing program efficiency. This is the most common use for any business management program.
It is a key quality in DevSecOps and SRE methodologies.
Observability is not only a result of the implementation of advanced tools, but a fundamental characteristic of an application and its supporting infrastructure.
Architects and developers who create software (business management software, for example) must design it to be observable. Then, DevSecOps and SRE teams can use and interpret the observable data during the software delivery lifecycle to build better, more secure and resilient applications.
Oversees infrastructure, cloud and Kubernetes
The infrastructure and operations teams of an enterprise management program can:
- Leverage the best context provided by an observability solution to improve application uptime and performance.
- Reduce the time required to troubleshoot and resolve problems.
- Detect latency problems in the cloud and optimize the use of your resources.
- Improve management of your Kubernetes environments and modern cloud architectures.
Optimizes the user experience
A good user experience can enhance a company’s reputation and increase revenue, giving them an edge over the competition.
By detecting and resolving problems before users are aware of them and making improvements before they are requested, an organization can increase customer satisfaction and retention.
In addition, it is possible to optimize the user experience through real-time playback, gaining direct insight into the end-user experience, so that everyone can quickly agree on where to make improvements.
It is important that, as a Spanish company, you keep up to date with the latest trends in software development for business management.
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Observability is one of the most valued features in the industry and is essential to improve the efficiency and performance of your applications, as well as to enhance the user experience.
We encourage you to experience the benefits in this field with a free demo of our business management services – don’t wait any longer to take control of your operations and increase your company’s productivity!
