How monitoring and observability support cloud operations

Challenges in CloudOps

Growing complexity of cloud operations are a challenge for many companies.

There’s no doubt that cloud helps organizations adopt innovations for rapid digitalization, and achieve the scalability, flexibility, and security required to grow their business. And so we have more and more companies taking a cloud-first strategy for IT modernization and for driving business growth. Companies have adopted cloud-native solutions—including microservices, serverless, and container technologies—to meet their business needs. However, cloud operations teams require deeper insights to improve the performance of their cloud operations and get to the root cause of issues during operational interruptions.

Monitoring and observability

Getting to deeper insights and value faster with innovative solutions.

Using conventional monitoring techniques and tools for cloud operations gets complicated when tracing events for greater insights and tracking interdependencies across multiple systems in complex architectures.

Thankfully, today there are several innovative monitoring and observability tools which offer an end-to-end visibility into their IT operations, business operations, and enhance their customer experience. These tools help organizations to:

• Effectively monitor and understand the state of their IT environment. 
  
• Better manage their IT systems within the cloud environment they work in.
  
• Identify issues in a complex IT architecture and connect them to trace the root cause.
  
• Gain end-to-end visibility into the entire cloud architecture for administrators, analysts, and developers.
  

According to Gartner, “By 2026, 70% of organizations successfully applying observability will achieve shorter latency for decision making, enabling competitive advantage for target business or IT processes.”  

Reinforcing CloudOps

Ensuring effective monitoring and observability.

Clearly, monitoring and observability play a key role in unlocking value from cloud operations. But how do we ensure effective monitoring and observability? Here are three keys: 

• Define the right monitoring and observability methods for insights into cloud operations. Avoid a 'one-size-fits-all' approach to monitoring and observability of IT environments. What is monitored and the depth of observability need to align with the actual purpose for which the environments are being monitored. Monitoring helps understand the health of IT operations that serve business needs. With the right metrics, organizations can gain useful insights into the outcomes of operations, make informed decisions, and ensure uninterrupted cloud operations. Bringing together IT operations logs is important as it provides metrics for continuous visibility. 

• Implement the set of integrated tools and leverage cloud-native solutions. Identify and implement the right tools to monitor technologies and frameworks including container and messaging platforms in the IT environment. With real-time dashboards and reports, these tools can provide relevant insights into the cause and impact of problems in the IT environment. 

• Identify what really needs monitoring and observability from the ‘business’ lens. Consider the business perspective, not only the technology environment when deciding what needs monitoring and observability in the IT environment. Relate the key performance indicators (KPI) of business operations to the IT environment where monitoring and observability are applied. This will help site reliability engineering (SRE) teams to quickly identify and resolve issues as they would be aware of the business context.