Thanks to the brainchild of Adam Wiggins, the founder of the Twelve-factor app methodology, developers across the globe can build highly efficient, scalable, and innovative applications. However, with the rising complexities in the application development environment, conventional observability tools are falling short of monitoring the underlying complex cloud architectures, logs, and data. This shortcoming is being filled by cloud-native, modernized observability tools. With the addition of ML and AI, cloud observability tools are gaining prominence in enhancing the Twleve-factor app approach and helping business roll out new technologies. With numerous, modern-minded IT professionals now favouring the adoption of cloud-observability services, one may ask this question- Why the sudden upsurge of cloud observability solutions?
A Paradigm Shift: Why the Need for Cloud Observability?
Complete visibility: By offering a complete overview into the application health, behaviour, and performance, organizations can easily identify issues.
Scalability: Using a cloud-observability platform can help in meeting the demands of a microservices architecture through advanced storage and telemetry streaming.
Continuous Monitoring: Through real-time data access, organizations can identify and remediate issues proactively.
Minimizing Downtime: Instead of just reacting to known application issues, cloud-native observability offers you deep insights into the problems in your existing applications. This proactive approach helps to resolve issues efficiently, reducing downtime.
- DevOps: Automating cloud-native observability can help developers in quickly identifying errors across projects and containers and resolve them before it turns out to be a big issue.
- AI and Automation: Integrating AI and automation tools into cloud observability tools can help in detecting errors that may have been overlooked by software engineers and developers.
- Real-time Data Availability: Using cloud-native observability tools, developers can prepare a holistic approach to manage data appropriately, leverage insights, and deliver better outcomes.
Breaking Down the Components of Cloud-native Observability
Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
Application Performance Monitoring helps in tracking the performance of individual microservices through resource utilization, response times, and error rates. Using APM tools can assess performance issues and recommend proactive measures to enhance the application performance.
Tools: Grafana and Prometheus
Log Management and Analysis
Logs offer a complete visibility into the performance and behaviour of an application. Using log management and analysis tools for gathering, storing, and examining log data can help in detecting patterns or anomalies affecting the performance.
Tools: Beats, Elastic Stack, Kibana
Distributed Tracing
Distributed tracing is used for monitoring requests routed via microservices and identifying performance drawbacks. Developers can check the flow of these requests through microservices and find the root cause of any delays or other anomalies.
Infrastructure Monitoring
For cloud-native observability, infrastructure monitoring plays an important role to ensure that optimal resources are available to support the performance of the applications. Infrastructure monitoring offers a 360-degree overview into the performance of servers, storage, and networks to remediate issues before they can affect any application.
Alerting and Incident Response
By ensuring the reliability and availability of applications, alerting and incident response tools can help in detecting real-time issues, reduce downtime, and boost application availability.
Tools: Popular SIEM solutions such as Sentinel
Managed Observability Monitoring for AWS workloads: Read the blog
Deconstructing Popular Cloud Native Observability Tools in the Cloud
AWS-native Solutions
AWS offers a wide collection of cloud monitoring tools starting from AWS CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail for API visibility to AWS X-Ray for tracking and debugging, AWS ServiceLens for application health monitoring and so on.
Azure-native Solutions
Azure offers a series of monitoring tools such as Azure Service Health that tracks performance and status of services, Azure Advisor that monitors resource configurations and offers recommendations to achieve high performance, security, and availability and Azure Resource Health that offers complete visibility into multicloud environments and workloads. Using metrics for security, availability, and performance can give a clear picture into the issues affecting an enterprise’s cloud system.
GCP-native Solutions
Ensuring performance, security, and availability of GCP, GCP monitoring tools comprises:
- CloudZeroAnyCost- gives visibility into cloud costs
- Google Cloud Operations- Google Cloud Operations suite is built for monitoring, fixing, and improving the cloud infrastructure, software, and applications.
- Zenoss - A network monitoring tool, Zenoss consolidates IT infrastructure monitoring on a unified console, monitoring physical and virtual networks in real time
- Sematext -Monitors servers, database, container, Kubernetes, and applications and sends alerts for troubleshooting.
OCI-native Solutions
Offers tools that empowers DevOps, SRE, and IT teams to gain insights into the application systems and take remediation measures to resolve any performance issues.
Prometheus
Prometheus doesn't need any new introduction. Today, giants such as Ericcson, Soundcloud, Amadocs, and many others use Prometheus for monitoring and alerting. Based on an HTTP pull model, this tool gathers data and uses metrics such as time-series, key-value pairs, etc. to store data in a database. Users can customize these metrics depending on their application performance.
The Vision Ahead
Cloud4C, a leading managed services provider, offers cloud and application performance monitoring services for tracking, analysing, and managing multicloud applications and environments coupled with data analytics, full-stack visibility, and automation services. Our cloud observability solutions help organizations gain relevant and meaningful insights into the performance, security, and availability of your applications, encouraging informed decision-making and immediate remediation. Transform the performance of your applications and maximize cloud ROI with us.
Keen on making the move? Get in touch with our representative today or visit our website.
