Observability: How Every Business Can Afford a Solid Setup
By Aram Karapetyan • June 25, 2024
Metrics are numerical values that represent the state of your system over time, such as CPU usage, memory consumption, and request rates. Metrics help you identify trends and patterns.
Logs are detailed records of events that happen within your systems. They provide context for metrics and traces. Logs can show you what happened right before an error occurred.
Traces follow the path of a request through your system. They help you understand the flow of requests and identify where bottlenecks or issues arise. Traces are essential for debugging distributed systems.
APM tools provide insights into application performance. They monitor response times, error rates, and user interactions. APM tools help you understand how your applications perform in real time.
Datadog: Integrates metrics, logs, and traces into a single platform. It's famous for its ease of use and integration capabilities.
New Relic: Offers APM, infrastructure monitoring, and logging. It's known for its detailed application insights.
Prometheus: An open-source monitoring solution that's popular for metrics collection and alerting.
Grafana: Often used with Prometheus, Grafana provides powerful visualization capabilities for metrics.
Splunk: Primarily known for log management but also offers metrics and traces
Define Objectives: Understand what you want to achieve with observability. Identify the key metrics and logs you need to collect.
Choose Tools: Select the observability tools that best fit your needs. Consider factors like integration, ease of use, and scalability.
Instrument Your Code: Add instrumentation to your code to collect metrics, logs, and traces. Use libraries and agents provided by your observability tools.
Set Up Dashboards and Alerts: Create dashboards to visualize your data. Set up alerts to notify you when something goes wrong.
Continuously Improve: Regularly review your observability setup. Make adjustments as your system evolves.