The IT Pro Podcast: Keeping an eye on observability

In a lot of cases, being an IT admin is as much about prioritisation as anything else, and the mantra ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ is one that many technology professionals swear by. However, this approach leaves organisations at risk of having to suddenly fix critical errors with little notice.

This is why many businesses have adopted observability, deepening the monitoring of their applications and infrastructure in order to detect potential issues before they become critical. In this week’s IT Pro Podcast episode, we speak to Greg Ouillon, CTO of New Relic, about why observability has become so popular, the challenges it addresses and why it’s being used for more than just IT maintenance.

Highlights

“We now live in a world where software is much more fragmented with microservices architectures developed by multiple teams independently. Many organisations roll out software hundreds of times per day, or even thousands of times per day. And they deploy on highly volatile architectures like containers, cloud, Kubernetes clusters, where some of those infrastructures can be very short lived, literally minutes. So in a complex where your architecture is much more fragmented, much more complex and much more volatile, you cannot rely on monitoring as it was before.”

“It's very easy to add business attributes to an observability platform. Let me give you an example. You run a very large coffee estate worldwide with tens of thousands of points of sale; you can integrate observability in all the points of sale. So you can follow the behaviour of a point of sale in your shops, infrastructure, software, but you can also very easily capture the average amount of the basket, the revenue and sales, the type of loyalty card of your customers. And all of a sudden, on the same dashboard, you're not only following issues around CPU, RAM or transaction throughput, you're starting to follow the health of your business.”

Footnotes

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Highlights

Footnotes

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