In today’s digital world, understanding system performance is critical. The complexity of microservices architecture and cloud infrastructure adds unique challenges where performance issues can lead to significant disruptions. Observability provides a primary solution, allowing companies to track, analyze, and respond to changes quickly and effectively.
Without observability, companies risk losing track of problem sources, struggle to identify bottlenecks, and fail to understand the impact of changes made. So, how can observability form the foundation for ensuring your system’s availability, reliability, and performance? Explore the explanations in this article.
What is Observability?
Observability is the ability to gain deep visibility into a system’s internal state by analyzing its external outputs, such as logs, metrics, and traces. In IT, observability helps IT teams understand how their applications, infrastructure, and networks function, allowing them to detect issues that might go unnoticed by conventional monitoring. Observability enables early problem detection, fast root cause identification, and efficient system fixes, ultimately improving performance and reliability.
3 Pillars of Observability
The three pillars of observability—data collection, analysis, and visualization—are critical to system and application monitoring. By focusing on these pillars, companies can proactively manage and enhance system performance.
Data Collection
This process involves gathering various types of data from systems, applications, and infrastructure, including logs, metrics, and traces that provide insights into system performance and health.
Data Analysis
This involves processing and analyzing the collected data to identify patterns, trends, and potential issues. This process helps detect anomalies and provides valuable information for decision-making.
Visualization and Reporting
This pillar involves displaying data and analyses in easy-to-understand formats, such as dashboards, graphs, and reports. This allows teams to monitor system conditions and make informed decisions.
The Importance of Observability in the Digital Era
In the digital age, observability is crucial as it enables companies to monitor system performance and detect issues before they impact users. This capability allows IT teams to maintain optimal user experiences by monitoring response times, error rates, and application stability, even as systems become more complex.
Observability also speeds up problem identification and resolution in interconnected environments, minimizing downtime and reducing business losses. Observability tools empower teams with accurate, real-time data, helping keep systems reliable and responsive. Additionally, observability supports scalability and security, allowing companies to use resources efficiently and detect potential threats early. Observability is not only a monitoring tool but also a key part of operational sustainability and digital transformation strategies.
How Observability Works in Server, Container, and Virtualization Environments
(alt text: Bagaimana Observability Bekerja dalam Lingkungan Server, Container, dan Virtualisasi)
In modern infrastructure, applications and services are no longer hosted on a single physical server but are distributed across environments like hardware, containers, and virtualization platforms. Observability is essential to ensure performance, reliability, and stability across all these layers of infrastructure.
Observability on Hardware
Focuses on monitoring hardware performance, such as CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network, to maintain optimal performance. Metrics and logs are used to detect anomalies, like usage spikes or performance drops, which can indicate underlying issues.
Observability on Containers
Involves monitoring individual containers’ health and resource utilities. Observing container clusters allows for performance and availability management across the system, which is especially critical in complex microservices environments.
Observability on Virtualized Environments
Monitoring VMs includes tracking CPU, memory, and disk I/O usage to ensure each VM operates at expected capacity. Observability on hypervisors, (a software that allows multiple operating systems to run on a single physical machine) which manage VMs, is also important for monitoring host performance and preventing resource contention.
The Benefits of Observability
Resource Optimization
- Identifying Bottlenecks: Teams can use performance metrics to pinpoint system areas experiencing slowdowns, such as CPU or network constraints.
- Efficient Resource Allocation: Observability helps optimize resource usage (e.g., CPU, memory, and disk), leading to more efficient server and system capacity use.
Faster Issue Detection and Resolution
- Alerting: Observability enables setting notifications or alerts for critical events, allowing teams to respond quickly.
- Root Cause Analysis: Using logs and traces, teams can track down root issues in detail, speeding up and refining the troubleshooting process.
Enhanced System Availability
- Proactive Monitoring: Observability allows proactive monitoring, so issues are detected and addressed before they impact users.
- Downtime Reduction: Observability speeds up repair times, reducing downtime and ensuring service availability for users.
Learn More: Understanding Observability: The Smart Solution for Detecting and Solving Unexpected IT Issues
Elastic Observability: A Comprehensive Solution for IT Infrastructure Optimization
Elastic Observability offers a comprehensive approach to monitoring and analyzing the performance and health of IT infrastructure, applications, and services in real-time, using the Elastic Stack. This technology is designed to provide deep visibility into systems, enabling IT teams to identify, diagnose, and resolve issues swiftly.
Elastic Observability leverages three core components: Elasticsearch for data search and analysis, Logstash or Elastic Agent for data collection and processing, and Kibana for data visualization. By integrating diverse data sources, Elastic Observability empowers organizations to gain a better understanding of how their applications and infrastructure are performing.
Key Features of Elastic Observability
- Log Monitoring: Collects and analyzes logs from multiple sources, providing in-depth insights into system and application behavior. With centralized logging, IT teams can quickly detect anomalies and trace the root causes of issues.
- Metric Monitoring: Monitors key metrics such as CPU, memory, and disk usage with visualizations that facilitate the identification of performance issues. This helps teams proactively monitor system health and diagnose bottlenecks.
- APM (Application Performance Monitoring): Provides detailed monitoring of application performance, helping to pinpoint bottlenecks affecting user experience. This feature offers transaction-level visibility and makes it easier to identify the root causes of application performance issues.
- Synthetic Monitoring: Simulates user interactions with applications to test performance and functionality, allowing for early issue detection before users are impacted.
- Real-Time Alerting: Equipped with customizable alerting features, allowing teams to configure notifications for critical conditions like CPU spikes or application errors.
- Machine Learning Anomaly Detection: Uses Machine Learning to automatically detect anomalies in log data, metrics, and traces.
Advantages of Elastic Observability
- Quick Incident Response: With comprehensive visibility and real-time alerts, Elastic Observability enables IT teams to detect and resolve issues quickly, reducing downtime and maintaining service availability.
- In-Depth Analysis: Facilitates deeper understanding of log and metric data, aiding in the identification of root causes.
- Enhanced Security: Integrated security features allow for efficient threat detection and response, protecting data and systems.
- Flexible Scalability: Built for large-scale environments, Elastic Observability supports hybrid and multi-cloud setups, allowing organizations to monitor infrastructure without switching tools as they grow.
- Automatic Anomaly Detection with Machine Learning: Leverages Machine Learning to automatically detect anomalies in logs and metrics, speeding up problem identification and reducing the risk of human error in data analysis.
Additional Tools to Strengthen Observability
xFusion (Server)
xFusion Server is a high-performance server solution designed for efficient data and application management. Commonly used in business environments, it supports a range of applications, from virtualization and data storage to big data processing. xFusion Server is equipped with advanced technology that enhances reliability, security, and ease of integration with other systems.
Key Advantages of xFusion:
- High Performance: Equipped with advanced processors and memory to handle heavy workloads.
- Scalability: Easily expandable without disrupting operations.
- Reliability: Redundancy features ensure high uptime.
- Energy Efficiency: Energy-efficient models reduce operational costs.
- Ease of Management: Intuitive management tools simplify monitoring.
- High Security: Security features protect data from cyber threats.
- Virtualization Support: Supports multiple environments on a single server.
- Flexibility: Suitable for a wide range of business applications, from storage to big data.
Integrating xFusion with Elastic Observability offers significant added value. Metric and log data from xFusion servers can be collected and further analyzed in Elastic Stack. By storing and visualizing server data in Kibana, organizations gain deeper insights that enable efficient troubleshooting and performance analysis. This integration allows the entire IT ecosystem to be monitored from a single, unified platform, enhancing both operational effectiveness and efficiency.
Red Hat OpenShift (Container & Virtualization)
Red Hat OpenShift is a container orchestration platform that supports the development, testing, and deployment of Kubernetes-based applications. OpenShift enables organizations to manage applications in containerized environments more easily and efficiently, simplifying application management from development to production and allowing IT teams to focus on innovation rather than platform challenges.
One of OpenShift’s main strengths is its ability to enhance application flexibility and scalability. By implementing a microservices architecture, each application can run in its own container, providing better isolation between applications. OpenShift also supports automation in deployment and container management, including CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment), allowing teams to release new features and updates more quickly and securely. Additionally, OpenShift offers virtualization support for traditional workloads, making it possible to manage both container and virtualized workloads within a single platform.
Integrating Red Hat OpenShift with Elastic Observability enables organizations to monitor the performance of applications and containers comprehensively. Metric and log data from applications running on OpenShift can be fed into Elastic Stack for analysis and visualization. This integration provides IT teams with a better understanding of application performance, helps identify bottlenecks, and allows for quick corrective action. Furthermore, Elastic Observability can itself be deployed on OpenShift in either containerized or virtualized format.
Read More: Tips for Building Modern Applications with the Right Infrastructure
Develop Your Company’s Observability Strategy with Virtus
Managing complex systems has never been easier with Elastic’s observability solutions. With powerful features like in-depth log monitoring, real-time metric analysis, and application performance tracking, Elastic ensures that your company can efficiently monitor and manage system performance. Not only Elastic, Virtus can also help integrate the Elastic Observability solution as an end-to-end monitoring function, built on Red Hat OpenShift as the container or virtualization software platform and xFusion Server as the hardware foundation, creating a fully integrated solution. Virtus Technology Indonesia (VTI) is ready to support your needs with customized consulting to optimize your systems’ performance and reliability.
Don’t wait until issues arise! Contact Virtus Technology Indonesia (VTI) and PT. InfraCom Technology for more information about observability solutions, including Elastic, xFusion (Server), and Red Hat OpenShift. As part of the CTI Group, Virtus in collaboration with PT. Infracom Technology is ready to assist with 24/7 support from expert teams, helping you identify and solve issues before they impact your business.
Author: Ary Adianto
Content Writer CTI Group
