Trace the journey through all those microservices in the background
Sponsored In modern IT, visibility is everything. IT admins and Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) survive on their ability to see what’s happening in their systems. Unfortunately, as systems get more sophisticated, it has become harder to see what they’re doing. That’s why the industry is promoting observability as the evolution of existing concepts like monitoring and metrics. Vendors are stepping up with tools to address a growing visibility gap. IT departments have been monitoring infrastructure and applications for decades, so isn’t ‘Observability’ just a marketing term for what’s already best practice? Not according to Dhiraj Goklani, area vice president of IT & DevOps, APAC at Splunk, which recently launched its Splunk Observability Cloud. « We had a massive shift to cloud infrastructure and containerized applications, because organizations are significantly accelerating their digital and direct-to-consumer initiatives, » he explains. Once upon a time, observers could peer into IT operations easily enough by running programs that directly monitored their servers’ operations. Applications were monolithic, so you would point monitoring software at them and log the results. Things got a lot more difficult when companies began abstracting everything and making it more distributed. When they started running everything in the cloud, they relied on cloud service providers’ monitoring services. When they spread operations between multiple cloud companies, along with their own on-premise solutions, things became more disjointed. Composable applications made things more difficult still. For years, companies had struggled to atomize their applications, constructing them from smaller, more manageable pieces. Microservices and the containers that run them finally bought that practice to the mainstream, giving development teams modular applications with pieces that they could update individually. The downside of this approach was that those smaller pieces, running on more abstracted cloud infrastructure, became more difficult to monitor. Developers now accessed those services via APIs when bolting them together to create new applications. Those interfaces also needed monitoring as part of the overall end-to-end journey. Legacy monitoring tools are often siloed, designed to examine certain parts of the stack or infrastructure domains. They cannot cope with complex, disjointed workflows. That’s the gap that observability tools fill by marrying applications and infrastructure into a single end-to-end view at all levels of the stack. That joined-up view demands better telemetry, Goklani explains. Splunk cut its teeth developing tools that took the analysis of machine-generated logs to the next level, enabling IT admins & SREs to derive sense from reams of operational data. Observability combines those with the metrics that summarize performance and availability. These forms of operational data are well understood, but there’s a third type that’s critical in modern composable cloud-based infrastructures, Goklani explains: traces. Traces document the interactions between the thousands – possibly millions – of microservices that work together to fulfil an application request. These small pieces of code are usually duplicated for a mixture of scale-out functionality and resilience.
