Observations on Observability

Author: Jon Corchis

Manager of Solutions Architecture, Unilogik Systems Inc.

---

After spending time with several clients, I see a common gap in their monitoring solutions – siloed data. Each team, department or project generated its own application and infrastructure observability data with no common way to look at the data across the organization.  

Not only was the data siloed, but the data's type and granularity are different. Under these conditions, problem diagnosis of operational issues becomes difficult and time-consuming.  Read on if you have been part of a swat team trying to figure out why there is an application issue late at night. 

Change in an organization normally comes in three forms: People, Process and Technology. 
In most cases, the teams are doing what’s right for them in terms of data collection, monitoring, alerts and support. However, if enterprise thinking is lost the Tragedy of the Commons applies. This gap clearly falls on Enterprise Architecture to provide an organizational strategy for observability. Included in that strategy is standard tooling to accomplish its objectives. One such tool that I am excited about is Dynatrace. 

With Dynatrace enterprises can quickly evolve their observability maturity. Install Dynatrace OneAgent on your key application hosts and Dynatrace will be able to provide a unified view of your full stack almost immediately. 
 
After several days of running Dynatrace will have a good picture of your application load and be able to identify saturation issues. Most importantly Dynatrace’s Root Cause Analysis is second to none – just ask Forrester or Gardner. These features alone go a long way in helping organizations meet their “do more with less” objective. 

There are so many other important features in Dynatrace that cannot be covered in a short article. If your organization is familiar with the pain points mentioned above and you are ready to evolve, reach out to [email protected] and ask for a demonstration. ​