Understanding Observability
Observability allows IT teams to fully understand the state of a system by analyzing outputs, such as logs and performance metrics, to create a holistic picture of the availability, performance, and user experience provided. This proactive process is key to identifying issues before they become true problems requiring significant work to remedy.
Observability plays a major role in the modern IT world, especially in the age of Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps). Observability feeds AIOps platforms with key insights, enabling more powerful automation to solve issues faster, especially before they impact user experience.
Furthermore, Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) at scale helps to improve the effectiveness of observability in two main ways. The first is by leveraging packet data to obtain the most accurate information directly from the network, driving better decision-making with actionable insights across both the network and services. The second is scalability, meaning it can support networks and services of any size, no matter how complex or large they are.
Components of Observability
Traditionally, the industry has thought of observability as being made up of four components, also known as telemetry data types: metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT). They impact observability in the following ways:
- Metrics: These are key performance indicators (KPIs) of observability. These can include many things, including latency, error rates, response times, capacity, and more. Metrics are used to measure performance in a quantifiable manner, produce alerts, and monitor events for any anomalies.
- Events: Significant activities that happen on a network are classified as events, especially when they impact performance, security, or operations. Knowing the activities that take place in the IT environment allows teams to pinpoint where issues occurred, what caused them, and how to remedy them in record time.
- Logs: Provide the who, what, when, where, and how of activities on the network. Log data must be structured, which can make analysis and aggregation difficult since many servers use different formats for their log data. Logs provide detail but can be cumbersome due to the size of the files.
- Traces: Allow admins to track down the source of alerts. Traces help teams uncover culprits of performance degradation and help teams troubleshoot issues faster. These can include workloads, API calls, queries, traffic, and more.
NETSCOUT goes beyond traditional MELT data sources, leveraging packet data to power observability and provide deeper, more actionable insights into network activity. Our data source feeds the decision-making engine to improve observability practices.
Benefits of Observability
Observability has several benefits across enterprise networks. These include:
- Enhanced System Performance and Reliability: Identifying slowdowns, issues, and outages faster and more efficiently improves time spent at maximum performance. It also makes the network and application more reliable and available by ensuring that users can access the tools they need at any time with ease.
- Proactive Issue Detection and Resolution: Observability solutions empower teams to proactively identify issues in network and application performance. This expedites the detection and resolution of these issues, improving user experience.
- Improved Developer and IT Workflow: The intelligence provided by observability solutions allows IT to provide more detailed reports to developers, giving them the information they need to facilitate better fixes, faster.
- Leveling up Cybersecurity: Threat intelligence is invaluable and the analysis performed in observability helps to enhance cybersecurity efforts and take them to new heights.
Challenges in Implementing Observability
There are several challenges that can arise when implementing observability, but two really stand out: Data overload/noise and integration with existing tools.
Data overload occurs when too much data exists and teams cannot handle the analysis of it at the scale it is provided. This can burden teams as they adapt to the breadth of knowledge provided by observability platforms. Having a solution in place that can decipher the raw packet and transcribe it into actionable insights is key to scaling observability efforts.
Integration is another big challenge. Existing solutions are important before, during, and after implementing observability as they house all historical data and can help fuel your new engine with key information. The problem is, when these solutions do not communicate properly, they can create friction in the configuration of new tools. Ensuring that tools communicate effectively before starting implementation can relieve a lot of headaches during this complex process.
What is Full Stack Observability?
Full stack observability enables IT teams to gain visibility into the entire stack of services and applications including infrastructure, packet analysis, synthetic testing, cybersecurity, and cloud solutions, spanning from the end user experience to the application and infrastructure, all in real time. This provides teams with comprehensive visibility into the behavior, performance, and health of all their applications and their infrastructures, unlocking powerful, actionable insights.
Full stack observability has use cases across the IT landscape, including cybersecurity, performance, digital experience monitoring, and process optimization, although it is difficult to truly accomplish due to the scale and breadth of instrumentation needed to achieve it. This helps lower costs in the long term while providing a more positive digital user experience across your enterprise, both for customers and employees.
How NETSCOUT Helps
NETSCOUT offers a new, advanced approach to observability based on unique Smart Data technology. This goes beyond the basic data sources many other vendors rely on and leverages DPI at scale to provide actionable insights from network packet data. NETSCOUT borderless visibility and scalable architecture empower enterprises and service providers to achieve observability across their entire digital ecosystem, from mission-critical applications and data centers to cloud and remote locations.
Leveraging better data for network insights can lead to better outcomes and user experiences. NETSCOUT solutions provide these powerful insights to improve digital experiences while integrating with nearly any AIOps or observability solution on the market.