Observability defines how much it is possible to measure the software’s execution performance and is essential for applications running in the cloud, given the dynamic nature of these environments.
It is important because it provides deep visibility into modern distributed applications. This favors problem identification and resolution in an automated and agile way.
Key points about observability:
- Invest in observability to identify or prevent problems.
An application with low observability makes it difficult to identify problems and their causes accurately. On the other hand, applications with high observability serve as tools to detect problems even before they occur.
- Use observability to evolve your application.
Observability can be instrumentalized for multiple functions that can bring maturity to the code, such as:
- Collecting and storing logs (records of relevant application and infrastructure events);
- Collecting and storing metrics (discrete measurements of environmental characteristics);
- Configuring tracing (identifying transactions between various systems and allowing inspection from infrastructure to the execution stack within application processes);
- Generating business metrics (such as sales from a retailer or payments from a financial system);
- Generating user experience metrics (such as page load time or uptime percentage). This ensures that business, development, and operations teams have a 360-degree view of the environment and can increase the quality of service.
- Collecting and storing logs (records of relevant application and infrastructure events);
