Every organisation is feeling the impacts of economic pressures, technological advancements, shifting regulatory demands, climate change, and evolving customer preferences which are rapidly reshaping business and industries. To keep pace, business leaders are urgently reinventing across their organisations.
In last month’s article ‘The C-suite guide to ‘observability’ I introduced the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of observability and how I believe it is essential to organisations for survival and growth. In short, observability is the strategic design of a system to enable continuous monitoring, analysis and improvement that helps build business resilience and unlock new opportunities for innovation and growth. In this article, I want to focus on the ‘how’ and share best practices for implementation.
- Define clear objectives: Before embarking on an observability journey, it's crucial to define clear objectives. What do you hope to achieve with observability? Are you primarily focused on improving operational resilience, enhancing customer experience, or meeting regulatory requirements? Defining clear objectives will help you prioritise your efforts and select the right tools and technologies.
Assess your current state: Conduct a thorough assessment of your existing IT environment, including your systems, applications, and infrastructure. Identify potential sources of telemetry data, such as logs, metrics, and traces. Assess the maturity of your monitoring and logging practices. This assessment will help you understand your starting point and identify areas for improvement.
Select the right tools: The observability landscape is vast and varied, with a multitude of tools and platforms available. Choose tools that align with your specific needs and objectives. Consider factors such as scalability, ease of use, integration capabilities, and cost. It's also important to select tools that can evolve with your organisation's needs as your systems and infrastructure grow and change.
Instrument your systems: Instrumentation is the process of embedding code or agents within your applications and infrastructure to collect telemetry data. This is a critical step in achieving observability, as it provides the raw data that will be used for analysis and visualisation. Choose instrumentation methods that are appropriate for your technology stack and that minimise performance overhead.
Collect and aggregate data: Once your systems are instrumented, you need to collect and aggregate the telemetry data. This involves setting up pipelines to transport data from various sources to a central location for storage and analysis. Consider using tools such as log shippers, message queues, or streaming platforms to facilitate this process.
- Store and analyse data: Observability data is typically stored in a time-series database or a log aggregation platform. These platforms are designed to handle large volumes of data and provide efficient querying and analysis capabilities. Leverage AI and machine learning to automate data analysis and anomaly detection, enabling you to identify potential issues before they impact users or customers.
- Visualise and alert: Observability platforms typically provide dashboards and visualisations which allow users to easily explore and understand telemetry data. This can help identify trends, patterns, and correlations that may not be immediately apparent from raw data. Configure alerts to notify relevant teams when pre-defined thresholds are exceeded or anomalies are detected, allowing for quick action to resolve issues.
Best practices
- Foster a culture of observability: Observability is not just about technology; it's also about people and processes. Encourage collaboration between development, operations and security teams. Promote a culture of continuous improvement, where data-driven insights are used to identify and address issues proactively.
If you would like to discuss observability and how to implement it at your organisation, contact Arya Choudhury.
To learn more, read our full report ‘Harnessing the power of observability to build business resilience.
