Laura: So, observability is a property of your systems that helps you understand what's going on with them, monitor what they're doing, and be able to get the information you need to troubleshoot.
Observability Explained with LogDNA
A common challenge associated with monitoring IT infrastructure is the need to balance observability requirements with storage limitations. A company has only so much hardware available for storing the IT logs its observability tool collects. Administrators need to occasionally delete logs to avoid exceeding storage capacity limits, but at the same time must be careful not to remove any technical data that may be needed for troubleshooting if a technical issue arises.
The observability tool that an organization relies on to monitor its IT infrastructure is often used by multiple teams. The application team may use the tool to track software malfunctions, while the cybersecurity group might leverage it to detect potential breach indicators. The fact that teams with different technical requirements must all use a single solution to monitor IT systems can negatively impact productivity, LogDNA argues.
Using its new $50 million funding round, LogDNA will accelerate the development of its observability data pipeline with the goal of launching the offering next year. The startup also has plans to continue growing its headcount, which it says has tripled over the last few years.
The three pillars of observability are: metrics, traces and logs. Instana automatically discovers and monitors components as they are deployed or scaled, capturing metrics with a 1 second resolution. All requests are traced end to end without any sampling. As part of the language runtime instrumentation, log messages at WARN or above are captured as part of the trace data. However there are numerous other sources for logs, message below the captured level and other components such as caches, data stores, proxies, etc. This is where a log management solution comes into play.
Still, results show that sentiment toward observability is generally positive, with 85% of participants responding they believe true observability is possible. This supports a need for new innovation that will improve ease of use and facilitate stronger cross-team collaboration. Results also support increasing demand for observability data pipeline solutions that enable enterprises to ingest all of their data to a single platform, normalize it, and seamlessly route it to the appropriate teams, so they can take meaningful action quickly within their workflows.
Last year the company released a report that revealed 74% of companies are struggling to achieve true observability, despite investing heavily in tools, with 38% admitting to spending $300,000 or more annually. Mezmo says it realized it occupied a unique position for solving observability challenges through its technical foundation, a log management SaaS, built on Kubernetes, that IBM incorporated into its global cloud computing framework. The company says its new pipeline integrates features of its log management platform, including search, alerting, and visualization capabilities.
Traces, also called Operations connect the steps of a single request across multiple calls within and across microservices. They can provide structured observability into the interactions of system components. Traces can begin early in the request process, like within the UI of an application, and can propagate through network services, across a network of microservices that handle the request. 2ff7e9595c
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