Calculating Costs for Observability

Observability is the only way to proactively manage production systems. Complex systems are the top challenge facing DevOps teams. Your customers depend upon you to deliver high reliability without slowing development productivity. You must invest in shortening outage durations and eliminating wasted developer time

Practitioners of DevOps and business leaders alike are beginning to understand that in order to scale and operate a service that drives growth and competitive edge, you must invest in the right tools and approach. Production system performance and uptime is just one aspect which directly impacts the customer experience and when you continuously deliver and integrate new features, systems become more complex and unless tightly managed, business risk goes up. Observability is a critical requirement that enables teams to level up and manage ever-increasing complexity.

Distributed systems architectures are inherently complex, and the addition of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) raises the stakes. Visibility and control are central to success and as delivery systems become automated, everything becomes more opaque and therefore harder to proactively manage. Add to this the abstraction layers of containers or a serverless infrastructure and the team feels farther removed from being in control. As a result, the number of potential causes for any given issue increases while your ability to point at any single issue as the cause is becoming much harder.

Debugging in production is a requirement for modern teams, especially for teams who ship frequently. DevOps teams need the best tools to debug issues when they come up, not just hope they can catch everything in staging. Our customers tell us that before Honeycomb, they frequently experienced incidents where problem sources were never identified. Teams can no longer rely on simple metrics alone to provide the level of insight they need to diagnose and resolve, especially at scale. Observable production systems enable you to move beyond locating gnarly bugs or fixing a problematic incident or outage. Designing your systems to include observability from the point at which a feature is released allows teams to immediately learn how it behaves in production and adjust before a critical outage occurs.