As modern applications are often no longer tied to their underlying infrastructure, consist of numerous loosely coupled microservices, and can rapidly move and scale, corporate IT needs urgent help to understand and prioritize the potential impact of the yellow and red lights on their monitoring dashboards. This is where observability must come in, in place of traditional monitoring, to save the day. While monitoring is a mostly static discipline based on the collection of predefined metrics and logs—often separate from applications, infrastructure, and services to detect anomalies or failures—observability provides deeper insights into the key factors influencing application performance and resilience. In other words, monitoring keeps an eye on static, often disconnected metrics, while observability looks for unknown issues based on the holistic analysis of metrics, traces, and logs across application stacks. As a result, observability can alert organizations about problems across the continuously changing environment and context.

Today, a custom enterprise application might be running on a Dell/VMware data center stack, but tomorrow it could be distributed across multiple cloud platforms, leveraging containerized microservices on AWS, serverless functions on Azure, and machine learning services from Google Cloud. Instead of looking at static metrics attached to infrastructure components, observability must be aligned to the overall applications, independent of architecture, infrastructure, and location. This puts corporate IT in the driver’s seat, as it can now prioritize proactive maintenance based on application impact rather than reactive firefighting tasks. Going one important step further, observability can map the impact of any infrastructure change back to the applications that it supports and all the way through to business KPIs. This enables IT operators to prioritize working on tasks based on business value, such as optimizing the transaction speed of an e-commerce shopping cart, over tasks that might not have the same degree of direct business impact (e.g., improving user experience on the corporate website).

As operational best practices evolve to deal with the steadily increasing complexity and scale of IT infrastructure and the applications they support, enterprises must move from traditional monitoring to proper observability approaches. And in today’s hybrid, multi-cloud, and increasingly container-based environments, observability strategies must also be hybrid in nature to cover modern application infrastructures as well as critical legacy systems upon which many organizations still rely. To do anything less than to strive to be as comprehensive as possible from a cross-domain perspective puts operational integrity, user experience, and business success at unacceptable risk.