auto scaling observability

Auto Scaling Observability

by Blog

Autoscaling Observability

In today's digital landscape, where applications and systems are becoming increasingly complex and dynamic, the need for efficient auto scaling observability has never been more critical. This blog post will delve into the fascinating world of auto scaling observability, exploring its importance, key components, and best practices. Let's embark on this journey together!

Auto scaling observability is the practice of monitoring and gathering data about the performance, health, and behavior of an application or system as it dynamically scales. It enables organizations to gain deep insights into their infrastructure, ensuring optimal performance, resource allocation, and cost-efficiency.

Data Collection and Monitoring: The foundation of auto scaling observability lies in effectively collecting and monitoring data from various sources, including metrics, logs, and traces. This allows for real-time visibility into the system's behavior and performance.

Metrics and Alerting: Metrics play a crucial role in understanding the health and performance of an application or system. By defining relevant metrics and setting up proactive alerts, organizations can quickly identify anomalies and take necessary actions.

Logs and Log Analysis: Logs provide a wealth of information about the internal workings of an application or system. Leveraging log analysis tools and techniques enables organizations to detect errors, troubleshoot issues, and gain valuable insights for optimization.

Distributed Tracing: In complex distributed systems, tracing requests across various services becomes essential. Distributed tracing enables end-to-end visibility, helping organizations identify bottlenecks, latency issues, and optimize system performance.

Define Clear Observability Goals: Before implementing auto scaling observability, it's crucial to define clear goals and objectives. This will ensure that the selected tools and strategies align with the organization's specific needs and requirements.

Choose the Right Monitoring Tools: There is a plethora of monitoring tools available in the market, each with its own strengths and features. Consider factors such as scalability, ease of integration, and customization options when selecting the right tool for your auto scaling observability needs.

Implement Robust Alerting Mechanisms: Setting up effective alerts is vital for timely responses to critical events. Define meaningful thresholds and ensure that alerts are routed to the appropriate teams or individuals for prompt action.

Embrace Automation: Auto scaling observability thrives on automation. Leverage automation tools and frameworks to streamline data collection, analysis, and alerting processes. This will save time, reduce human error, and enable faster decision-making.

Auto scaling observability has emerged as a crucial aspect of managing modern applications and systems. By embracing the art of auto scaling observability, organizations can unlock the power of data insights, optimize performance, and enhance overall system reliability. So, take the first step towards a more observant future, and witness the transformation it brings to your digital landscape.

Matt Conran

Highlights: Auto-scaling Observability

Understanding Auto-Scaling Observability

1: ) Auto-scaling observability refers to a system’s ability to adjust its resources based on real-time monitoring and analysis automatically. It combines two essential components: auto-scaling, which dynamically allocates resources, and observability, which provides insights into the system’s behavior and performance.

2: ) By leveraging advanced monitoring tools and intelligent algorithms, auto-scaling observability enables organizations to optimize resource allocation and respond swiftly to changing demands.

3: ) Auto scaling observability involves the continuous monitoring and analysis of system metrics to automate the scaling of resources. This process allows organizations to automatically increase or decrease their computing power based on current demand, ensuring that applications run smoothly without over-provisioning or incurring unnecessary costs.

Auto-Scaling – Key Points:

– Enhanced Scalability and Performance: Auto-scaling observability allows systems to scale resources up or down based on actual usage patterns. This ensures that the system can handle peak loads efficiently without overprovisioning resources during periods of low demand. Organizations can avoid costly downtime by dynamically adjusting resources and ensuring optimal performance during sudden traffic spikes.

– Cost Optimization: With auto-scaling observability, businesses can significantly reduce infrastructure costs. Organizations can avoid unnecessary idle resource expenditures by accurately provisioning resources based on real-time data. This cost optimization approach ensures that companies only pay for the resources required, resulting in considerable savings.

– Improved Fault Tolerance: Auto-scaling observability is crucial in enhancing system resilience. Organizations can promptly identify and address potential issues by continuously monitoring the system’s health. In case of anomalies or failures, the system can automatically scale resources or trigger alerts for immediate remediation. This proactive approach minimizes the impact of failures and enhances the system’s overall fault tolerance.

Auto-scaling Example: Scaling with Docker Swarm

Auto Scaling – Key Components:

To fully harness the power of auto scaling observability, it’s important to understand its key components. These include metrics collection, alerting, and automated responses. Let’s delve deeper into each of these elements:

1. **Metrics Collection:** Gathering data from various sources is the foundation of observability. This involves collecting CPU usage, memory utilization, network traffic, and other vital metrics. With comprehensive data, organizations can better understand their infrastructure’s behavior and make informed scaling decisions.

2. **Alerting:** Once data is collected, it’s essential to set up alerts for any anomalies or thresholds that are breached. Alerting enables teams to respond swiftly to potential issues, minimizing downtime and maintaining application performance.

3. **Automated Responses:** The ultimate goal of observability is to automate responses to fluctuating demands. By employing pre-defined rules and machine learning algorithms, businesses can ensure that resources are scaled up or down automatically, optimizing both performance and cost.

**The Role of the Metric**

“What Is a Metric: Good for Known” Regarding auto-scaling observability and metrics, one must understand the metric’s downfall. A metric is a single number, with tags optionally appended for grouping and searching those numbers. They are disposable and cheap and have a predictable storage footprint.

A metric is a numerical representation of a system state over a recorded time interval. It can tell you if a particular resource is over or underutilized at a specific moment. For example, CPU utilization might be at 75% right now.

Implementing Auto-Scaling Observability

Choosing the Right Monitoring Tools: To effectively implement auto-scaling observability, organizations must select appropriate monitoring tools that provide real-time insights into system performance, resource utilization, and user behavior. These tools should offer robust analytics capabilities and seamless integration with auto-scaling platforms.

Defining Metrics and Thresholds: Accurate metrics and thresholds are critical for successful auto-scaling observability. Organizations must identify key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with their business objectives and set appropriate thresholds for scaling actions. For example, CPU utilization, response time, and error rates are standard metrics for auto-scaling decisions.

Automating Scaling Actions: Organizations should automate scaling actions based on predefined rules to fully leverage the benefits of auto-scaling observability. By integrating monitoring tools, auto-scaling platforms, and orchestration frameworks, businesses can ensure that resource allocation adjustments are performed seamlessly and without human intervention.

Service Mesh & Auto-Scaling

Service mesh acts as a dedicated infrastructure layer for managing service-to-service communications. It provides a suite of capabilities, including traffic management, security, and, most importantly, observability. By integrating a service mesh, such as Istio or Linkerd, into your auto scaling environment, you gain granular visibility into your microservices architecture. This includes detailed metrics, tracing, and logging, enabling you to monitor traffic patterns, latency, and error rates with precision.

### Implementing Service Mesh for Optimal Observability

Deploying a service mesh involves several considerations to maximize its observability benefits. Start by identifying the microservices that will benefit most from enhanced observability. Next, configure the service mesh to collect and process telemetry data effectively. Ensure your observability stack—comprising metrics, logs, and traces—is equipped to handle the data influx. Finally, leverage the insights gained to optimize your auto scaling strategy, ensuring minimal downtime and optimal performance.

### What is a Cloud Service Mesh?

A cloud service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that manages service-to-service communication within a distributed application. It decouples the networking logic from the application code, enabling developers to focus on core functionality without worrying about the complexities of inter-service communication. Service meshes provide features like load balancing, service discovery, and security policies, making them indispensable for modern cloud-native applications.

### Key Benefits of Service Mesh

#### Simplified Networking

One of the primary benefits of a service mesh is the simplification of networking within a microservices architecture. By abstracting the communication logic, service meshes make it easier to manage and scale applications. Developers can implement features like retries, timeouts, and circuit breakers without modifying their application code.

#### Enhanced Security

Service meshes provide robust security features, including mutual TLS (mTLS) for service-to-service encryption and authentication. This ensures that communication between services is secure by default, reducing the risk of data breaches and unauthorized access.

#### Traffic Management

With a service mesh, you can intelligently route traffic between services based on various criteria such as load, service version, or geographic location. This level of control enables canary deployments, blue-green deployments, and A/B testing, making it easier to roll out new features with minimal risk.

### The Role of Observability

Observability is the ability to measure the internal states of a system based on the outputs it produces. In the context of a service mesh, observability involves collecting and analyzing metrics, logs, and traces to gain insight into the performance and behavior of the services.

### Why Observability Matters

Without proper observability, managing a service mesh can become a daunting task. Observability allows you to monitor the health of your services, detect anomalies, and troubleshoot issues in real-time. It provides the visibility needed to ensure that your service mesh is functioning as intended and that any problems are quickly identified and resolved.

### Tools and Techniques

Several tools can enhance observability in a service mesh, such as Prometheus for metrics, Jaeger for tracing, and Fluentd for logging. Combining these tools provides a comprehensive view of your service mesh’s performance and health, enabling proactive maintenance and quicker issue resolution.

Gaining Visibility with Google Ops Agent

**The Role of Google Ops Agent in Observability**

Google Ops Agent is a unified agent that simplifies the process of collecting telemetry data from your cloud environment. Its ability to seamlessly integrate with Google Cloud’s operations suite makes it an essential tool for businesses looking to enhance their auto-scaling observability. By providing detailed insights into CPU usage, memory utilization, and network traffic, Google Ops Agent ensures that your infrastructure is both monitored and optimized in real-time.

**Benefits of Enhanced Observability**

With Google Ops Agent in place, businesses gain a clearer picture of how their auto-scaling systems are functioning. This enhanced observability translates to several benefits: improved system reliability, faster troubleshooting, and better resource allocation. By actively monitoring metrics and logs, organizations can preemptively address issues before they escalate into significant problems. Furthermore, insights derived from this data can inform future scaling strategies and infrastructure investments.

**Example: Understanding Ops Agent**

Ops Agent is a lightweight and efficient monitoring agent developed by Google Cloud. It enables you to collect crucial metrics and logs from your Compute Engine instances, providing valuable insights into their performance and health. By leveraging Ops Agent, you can proactively detect issues, troubleshoot problems, and optimize the utilization of your instances.

To begin monitoring your Compute Engine instances with Ops Agent, install it on your virtual machines. The installation process is straightforward and can be done using package managers like apt or yum. Once installed, Ops Agent seamlessly integrates with Google Cloud Monitoring, allowing you to access and analyze the gathered data.

After installing Ops Agent, it is essential to configure the monitoring metrics that you want to collect. Ops Agent supports many metrics, including CPU usage, memory utilization, disk I/O, and network traffic. By tailoring the metrics collection to your specific needs, you can efficiently monitor the performance of your Compute Engine instances and identify any anomalies or bottlenecks.

What is GKE-Native Monitoring?

GKE-Native Monitoring is a powerful monitoring solution provided by Google Cloud Platform (GCP) designed explicitly for GKE clusters. It leverages the capabilities of Prometheus and Stackdriver, offering a unified monitoring experience within the GCP ecosystem. With GKE-Native Monitoring, users can effortlessly collect, visualize, and analyze metrics and logs related to their GKE clusters, enabling them to make data-driven decisions and proactively address any issues that may arise.

GKE-Native Monitoring offers a range of features that enhance observability and simplify monitoring workflows. Some notable features include:

1. Automatic Metric Collection: GKE-Native Monitoring automatically collects a rich set of metrics from every GKE cluster, including CPU and memory utilization, network traffic, and application-specific metrics. This eliminates the need for manual configuration and ensures comprehensive monitoring that is out of the box.

2. Custom Metrics and Alerts: Users can define custom metrics and alerts tailored to their applications and business requirements. This empowers them to monitor critical aspects of their clusters and receive notifications when predefined thresholds are crossed, enabling timely actions and proactive troubleshooting.

3. Integration with Stackdriver Logging: GKE-Native Monitoring integrates with Stackdriver Logging, allowing users to correlate log data with metrics. By combining logs and metrics, users can gain a holistic view of their application’s behavior and quickly identify the root causes of any issues.

Kubernetes Autoscaling

Kubernetes auto scaling involves dynamically adjusting the number of running pods in a cluster based on current demand. This ensures that applications remain responsive while optimizing resource utilization. With the right configuration, auto scaling can help maintain performance during traffic spikes and reduce costs during low-traffic periods.

**Benefits of Implementing Auto Scaling**

The implementation of Kubernetes auto scaling brings a multitude of benefits to organizations. Firstly, it enhances resource efficiency by ensuring that applications use only the necessary resources, reducing wastage and lowering operational costs. Secondly, it improves application performance and reliability by adapting to traffic fluctuations, ensuring a consistent user experience even during peak demand. Moreover, auto scaling supports rapid scaling for new deployments, enabling businesses to respond swiftly to market changes without manual intervention.

**Challenges and Best Practices**

While Kubernetes auto scaling offers significant advantages, it also presents challenges that organizations need to navigate. One common issue is configuring the right scaling metrics and thresholds to avoid over-provisioning or under-provisioning resources. It’s crucial to thoroughly test and monitor these settings in a staging environment before deploying them to production. Additionally, consider using custom metrics that align closely with your application’s performance indicators for more accurate scaling decisions. Regularly reviewing and updating your scaling policies ensures they remain effective as application workloads evolve.

### Types of Auto Scaling in Kubernetes

Kubernetes offers several types of auto scaling, each designed to address different aspects of resource management. The most commonly used are Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA), Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA), and Cluster Autoscaler.

1. **Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA):** HPA adjusts the number of pod replicas in a deployment or replication controller based on observed CPU utilization or other select metrics. It’s ideal for applications with varying workloads, ensuring that resources are available when needed and conserved when demand is low.

2. **Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA):** VPA automatically adjusts the CPU and memory requests and limits for containers within pods. This ensures that each pod has the right amount of resources, preventing over-provisioning and under-provisioning.

3. **Cluster Autoscaler:** This tool automatically adjusts the size of the Kubernetes cluster so that all pods have a place to run. It adds nodes when pods are unschedulable due to resource shortages and removes nodes when they’re underutilized.

### Configuring Auto Scaling in Kubernetes

To leverage Kubernetes auto scaling effectively, you’ll need to configure it to meet your application’s specific needs. The process typically involves setting up metrics and thresholds that trigger scaling actions.

For HPA, you’ll define the target CPU utilization or other custom metrics that the autoscaler should monitor. VPA requires setting up recommendations for resource requests and limits. Finally, the Cluster Autoscaler needs to be linked with your cloud provider to manage node scaling efficiently.

It’s crucial to regularly monitor and adjust these configurations to ensure optimal performance, as application demands can evolve over time.

### Best Practices for Kubernetes Auto Scaling

Implementing auto scaling in Kubernetes is not a set-it-and-forget-it task. Here are some best practices to consider:

– **Understand Your Workloads:** Analyze your application’s workload patterns to choose the right type of auto scaling and set appropriate thresholds.

– **Use Custom Metrics:** While CPU and memory are common metrics, consider using application-specific metrics to drive more accurate scaling decisions.

– **Test and Monitor:** Regularly test your auto scaling configurations in a non-production environment. Continuous monitoring and logging are essential to catch and resolve issues early.

You can dynamically scale up or down any architecture component through autoscaling.

An example of a good use of autoscaling is as follows:

You may need additional web servers to handle the surge in traffic at the end of the day when your website’s load increases. Where does the rest of the day fit in? Your servers can’t sit idle during most business hours. Especially if you’re using a cloud provider, you want to optimize your environment’s potential costs. An autoscale allows you to increase the number of components during a spike and scale down during a regular period.

Example: Prometheus Pull Approach

There can be many tools to gather metrics, such as Prometheus, along with several techniques used to collect these metrics, such as the PUSH and PULL approaches. There are pros and cons to each method. However, Prometheus metric types and its PULL approach are prevalent in the market. However, if you want full observability and controllability, remember it is solely in metrics-based monitoring solutions.  For additional information on Monitoring and Observability and their difference, visit this post on observability vs monitoring.

These autoscalers rely on Kubernetes’ metric server for scaling up or down k8s objects.

Adopting Auto-scaling

Autoscaling is a mechanism that automatically adjusts the number of computing resources allocated to an application based on its demand. By dynamically scaling resources up or down, autoscaling enables organizations to handle fluctuating workloads efficiently. However, robust observability is crucial to harness the power of autoscaling truly.

The Role of Observability in Autoscaling

Observability is the ability to gain insights into a system’s internal state based on its external outputs. It plays a pivotal role in understanding the system’s behavior, identifying bottlenecks, and making informed scaling decisions regarding autoscaling. It provides visibility into key metrics like CPU utilization, memory usage, and network traffic. With observability, you can make data-driven decisions and ensure optimal resource allocation.

 Monitoring and Metrics

To achieve effective autoscaling observability, comprehensive monitoring is essential. Monitoring tools collect various metrics, such as response times, error rates, and resource utilization, to provide a holistic view of your infrastructure. These metrics can be analyzed to identify patterns, detect anomalies, and trigger autoscaling actions when necessary. You can proactively address performance issues and optimize resource utilization by monitoring and analyzing metrics.

Logging and Tracing

In addition to monitoring, logging, and tracing are critical components of autoscaling observability. Logging captures detailed information about system events, errors, and activities, enabling you to troubleshoot issues and gain insights into system behavior. Tracing helps you understand the flow of requests across different services. Logging and tracing provide a granular view of your application’s performance, aiding in autoscaling decisions and ensuring smooth operation.

Automation and Alerting

Automation and alerting mechanisms are vital to mastering autoscaling observability. You can configure thresholds and triggers that initiate autoscaling actions based on predefined conditions by setting up automated processes. This allows for proactive scaling, ensuring your system is constantly optimized for performance. Additionally, timely alerts can notify you of critical events or anomalies, enabling you to take immediate action and maintain the desired scalability.

Autoscaling observability is the key to unlocking its true potential. By understanding your system’s behavior through comprehensive monitoring, logging, and tracing, you can make informed decisions and ensure optimal resource allocation. With automation and alerting mechanisms, you can proactively respond to changing demands and maintain high efficiency. Embrace autoscaling observability and take your infrastructure management to new heights.

Managed Instance Groups

### Auto Scaling: Adapting to Your Needs

One of the standout features of managed instance groups is auto scaling. With auto scaling, your infrastructure can dynamically adjust to the current demand. This ensures that your applications have the necessary resources without overspending. By setting up policies based on CPU usage, requests per second, or custom metrics, MIGs can efficiently allocate resources, keeping your applications responsive and your costs under control.

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### Observability: Keeping a Close Watch

Observability is key in maintaining the health of your cloud infrastructure. Google Cloud’s managed instance groups provide comprehensive monitoring tools that give you insights into the performance and stability of your instances. By leveraging metrics, logs, and traces, you can detect anomalies, optimize performance, and ensure your applications run smoothly. This proactive approach to monitoring allows you to address potential issues before they impact your services.

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### Integration with Google Cloud

Managed instance groups seamlessly integrate with various Google Cloud services, enhancing their utility and flexibility. From load balancing to deploying containerized applications with Google Kubernetes Engine, MIGs work in tandem with Google’s ecosystem to provide a cohesive and powerful cloud solution. This integration not only simplifies management but also boosts the scalability and reliability of your applications.

Managed Instance Group

Related: Before you proceed, you may find the following helpful

  1. Load Balancing
  2. Microservices Observability
  3. Network Functions
  4. Distributed Systems Observability

Autoscaling Observability

Understanding Autoscaling

-Before we discuss observability, let’s briefly explore the concept of autoscaling. Autoscaling refers to the ability of an application or infrastructure to automatically adjust its resources based on demand. It enables organizations to handle fluctuating workloads and optimize resource allocation efficiently.

-Observability, in the context of autoscaling, refers to gaining insights into an autoscaling system’s performance, health, and efficiency. It involves collecting, analyzing, and visualizing relevant data to understand the application and infrastructure’s behavior and patterns.

-Through observability, organizations can make informed decisions to optimize autoscaling algorithms, resource allocation, and overall system performance. To achieve effective autoscaling observability, several critical components come into play. These include:

A. Metrics and Monitoring: Gathering and monitoring key metrics such as CPU utilization, response times, request rates, and error rates is fundamental for understanding the application and infrastructure’s performance.

B. Logging and Tracing: Logging captures detailed information about events and transactions within the system, while tracing provides insights into the flow of requests across various components. Both logging and tracing contribute to a comprehensive understanding of system behavior.

C. Alerting and Thresholds: Setting up appropriate alerts and thresholds based on predefined criteria ensures timely notifications when specific conditions are met.  

Tools and Technologies for Autoscaling Observability

A wide range of tools and technologies are available to facilitate autoscaling observability. Prominent examples include Prometheus, Grafana, Elasticsearch, Kibana, and CloudWatch. These tools provide robust monitoring, visualization, and analysis capabilities, enabling organizations to gain deep insights into their autoscaling systems.

The first component of observability is the channels that convey observations to the observer. There are three channels: logs, traces, and metrics. These channels are common to all areas of observability, including data observability.

1.Logs: Logs are the most typical channel and take several forms (e.g., a line of free text or JSON). They are intended to encapsulate information about an event.

2.Traces: Traces allow you to do what logs don’t—reconnect the dots of a process. Because traces represent the link between all events of the same process, they allow the whole context to be derived from logs efficiently. Each pair of events, an operation, is a span that can be distributed across multiple servers.

3.Metrics: Finally, we have metrics. Every system state has some component that can be represented with numbers, and these numbers change as the state changes.

Understanding VPC Flow Logs

VPC Flow Logs capture information about the IP traffic going in and out of Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) within Google Cloud. Enabling VPC Flow Logs allows you to gain visibility into network traffic at the subnet level, thereby facilitating network troubleshooting, security analysis, and performance monitoring.

Once the VPC Flow Logs are enabled and data starts flowing in, it’s time to tap into the potential of Google Cloud Logging. Using the appropriate filters and queries, you can sift through the vast amount of log data and extract meaningful insights. Whether it’s identifying suspicious traffic patterns, monitoring network performance metrics, or investigating security incidents, Google Cloud Logging provides a robust set of tools to facilitate these analyses.

Auto Scaling Observability

**Metrics: Resource Utilization Only**

– Metrics help us understand resource utilization. In a Kubernetes environment, these metrics are used for auto-healing and auto-scheduling. Monitoring performs several functions when it comes to metrics. First, it can collect, aggregate, and analyze metrics to identify known patterns that indicate troubling trends.

– The critical point here is that it shifts through known patterns. Then, based on a known event, metrics trigger alerts that notify when further investigation is needed. Finally, we have dashboards that display the metrics data trends adapted for visual consumption.

– These monitoring systems work well for identifying previously encountered known failures but don’t help as much for the unknown. Unknown failures are the norm today with disgruntled systems and complex system interactions.

– Metrics are suitable for dashboards, but there won’t be a predefined dashboard for unknowns, as it can’t track something it does not know about. Using metrics and dashboards like this is a reactive approach, yet it’s widely accepted as the norm. Monitoring is a reactive approach best suited for detecting known problems and previously identified patterns. 

**Metrics and intermittent problems**

– The metrics can help you determine whether a microservice is healthy or unhealthy within a microservices environment. Still, a metric will have difficulty telling you if a microservices function takes a long time to complete or if there is an intermittent problem with an upstream or downstream dependency. So, we need different tools to gather this type of information.

– We have an issue with auto-scaling metrics because they only look at individual microservices with a given set of attributes. So, they don’t give you a holistic view of the problem. For example, the application stack now exists in numerous locations and location types; we need a holistic viewpoint.

– A metric does not give this. For example, metrics track simplistic system states that indicate a service is running poorly or may be a leading indicator or an early warning signal. However, while those measures are easy to collect, they don’t turn out to be proper measures for triggering alerts.

Latency & Cloud Trace

Latency, in the context of applications, refers to the time it takes for a request to travel from the user to the server and back. Various factors, such as network delays, server processing time, and database queries influence it. Understanding latency is essential for developers to identify bottlenecks and optimize their applications for better performance.

Google Cloud Trace is a powerful tool provided by Google Cloud Platform that allows developers to analyze and diagnose application latency issues. By integrating Cloud Trace into their applications, developers can gain valuable insights into their code’s performance and identify areas for improvement.

Developers need to capture traces to analyze application latency effectively. Traces provide a detailed record of a request’s execution path, allowing developers to pinpoint the exact areas where latency occurs. With Cloud Trace, developers can easily capture and visualize traces in a user-friendly interface.

Auto-scaling metrics: Issues with dashboards

Useful only for a few metrics

So, these metrics are gathered and stored in time-series databases, and we have several dashboards to display these metrics. These dashboards were first built, and there weren’t many system metrics to worry about. You could have gotten away with 20 or so dashboards. But that was about it.

As a result, it was easy to see the critical data anyone should know about for any given service. Moreover, those systems were simple and did not have many moving parts. This contrasts with modern services that typically collect so many metrics that fitting them into the same dashboard is impossible.

Issues with aggregate metrics

So, we must find ways to fit all the metrics into a few dashboards. Here, the metrics are often pre-aggregated and averaged. However, the issue is that the aggregate values no longer provide meaningful visibility, even when we have filters and drill-downs. Therefore, we need to predeclare conditions that describe conditions we expect in the future. 

This is where we use instinctual practices based on past experiences and rely on gut feeling. Remember the network and software hero? It would help to avoid aggregation and averaging within the metrics store. On the other hand, we have percentiles that offer a richer view. Keep in mind, however, that they require raw data.

**Auto Scaling Observability: Any Question**

A: ) For auto-scaling observability, we take on an entirely different approach. They strive for other exploratory methods to find problems. Essentially, those operating observability systems don’t sit back and wait for an alert or something to happen. Instead, they are always actively looking and asking random questions to the observability system.

B: ) Observability tools should gather rich telemetry for every possible event, having full content of every request and then being able to store it and query it. In addition, these new auto-scaling observability tools are specifically designed to query against high-cardinality data. High cardinality allows you to interrogate your event data in any arbitrary way that we see fit. Now, we ask any questions about your system and inspect its corresponding state. 

**No predictions in advance**

C: ) Due to the nature of modern software systems, you want to understand any inner state and services without anticipating or predicting them in advance. For this, we need to gain valuable telemetry and use some new tools and technological capabilities to gather and interrogate this data once it has been collected. Telemetry needs to be constantly gathered in flexible ways to debug issues without predicting how failures may occur. 

D: ) Conditions affecting infrastructure health change infrequently and are relatively more straightforward to monitor. In addition, we have several well-established practices to predict, such as capacity planning and the ability to remediate automatically, e.g., auto-scaling in a Kubernetes environment. All of these can be used to tackle these types of known issues.

E: ) Due to its relatively predictable and slowly changing nature, the aggregated metrics approach monitors and alerts perfectly for infrastructure problems. So here, a metric-based system works well. Metrics-based systems and their associated signals help you see when capacity limits or known error conditions of underlying systems are being reached.

F: ) So, metrics-based systems work well for infrastructure problems that don’t change much but fall dramatically short in complex distributed systems. For these systems, you should opt for an observability and controllability platform. 

Summary: Autoscaling Observability

Auto-scaling has revolutionized how we manage cloud resources, allowing us to adjust capacity dynamically based on demand. However, ensuring optimal performance and efficiency in auto-scaling environments requires proper observability. In this blog post, we explored the importance of auto-scaling observability and how it can enhance the overall effectiveness of your infrastructure.

Understanding Auto Scaling Observability

To truly grasp the significance of auto scaling observability, we must first understand what it entails. Auto-scaling observability refers to monitoring and gaining insights into the behavior and performance of auto-scaling groups and their associated resources. It involves collecting and analyzing various metrics, logs, and events to gain a comprehensive view of your infrastructure’s health and performance.

Key Metrics for Auto-Scaling Observability

When it comes to auto scaling observability, specific metrics play a crucial role in assessing the efficiency and performance of your infrastructure. Metrics like average CPU utilization, network throughput, and request latency can provide valuable insights into resource utilization, bottlenecks, and overall system health. Monitoring these metrics enables you to make informed decisions about scaling actions and resource allocation.

Implementing Effective Monitoring and Alerting

To achieve optimal auto-scaling observability, robust monitoring, and alerting mechanisms are essential. This involves setting up monitoring tools that can collect and analyze relevant metrics in real time. Configuring intelligent alerting systems can notify you of any anomalies or issues requiring immediate attention. By proactively monitoring and alerting, you can identify and address potential problems before they impact your system’s performance.

Leveraging Logging and Tracing for Deep Insights

Besides metrics, logging, and tracing provide deeper insights into the behavior and interactions within your auto-scaling environment. By capturing detailed logs and tracing requests across various services, you can gain visibility into the data flow and identify potential bottlenecks or errors. Proper logging and tracing practices can help troubleshoot issues, optimize performance, and enhance the overall reliability of your infrastructure.

Scaling Observability for Greater Efficiency

Auto-scaling observability is not a one-time setup; it requires continuous refinement and scaling alongside your infrastructure. As your system evolves, adapting your observability practices to match the changing demands is crucial. This may involve configuring additional monitoring tools, fine-tuning alert thresholds, or expanding log retention. By scaling observability in parallel with your infrastructure, you can ensure its efficiency and effectiveness in the long run.

Conclusion

In conclusion, auto scaling observability is critical to managing and optimizing cloud resources. Investing in proper monitoring, alerting, logging, and tracing practices can unlock the full potential of auto scaling. Improved observability leads to enhanced efficiency, performance, and reliability of your infrastructure, ultimately enabling you to provide better experiences to your users.

System Observability

Distributed Systems Observability

by BlogPublications

Distributed Systems Observability

In the realm of modern technology, distributed systems have become the backbone of numerous applications and services. However, the increasing complexity of such systems poses significant challenges when it comes to monitoring and understanding their behavior. This is where observability steps in, offering a comprehensive solution to gain insights into the intricate workings of distributed systems. In this blog post, we will embark on a captivating journey into the realm of distributed systems observability, exploring its key concepts, tools, and benefits.

Observability, as a concept, enables us to gain deep insights into the internal state of a system based on its external outputs. When it comes to distributed systems, observability takes on a whole new level of complexity. It encompasses the ability to effectively monitor, debug, and analyze the behavior of interconnected components across a distributed architecture. By employing various techniques and tools, observability allows us to gain a holistic understanding of the system's performance, bottlenecks, and potential issues.

To achieve observability in distributed systems, it is crucial to focus on three interconnected components: logs, metrics, and traces.

Logs: Logs provide a chronological record of events and activities within the system, offering valuable insights into what has occurred. By analyzing logs, engineers can identify anomalies, track down errors, and troubleshoot issues effectively.

Metrics: Metrics, on the other hand, provide quantitative measurements of the system's performance and behavior. They offer a rich source of data that can be analyzed to gain a deeper understanding of resource utilization, response times, and overall system health.

Traces: Traces enable the visualization and analysis of transactions as they traverse through the distributed system. By capturing the flow of requests and their associated metadata, traces allow engineers to identify bottlenecks, latency issues, and performance optimizations.

In the ever-evolving landscape of distributed systems observability, a plethora of tools and frameworks have emerged to simplify the process. Prominent examples include:

1. Prometheus: A powerful open-source monitoring and alerting system that excels in collecting and storing metrics from distributed environments.

2. Jaeger: An end-to-end distributed tracing system that enables the visualization and analysis of transaction flows across complex systems.

3. ELK Stack: A comprehensive combination of Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana, which collectively offer powerful log management, analysis, and visualization capabilities.

4. Grafana: A widely-used open-source platform for creating rich and interactive dashboards, allowing engineers to visualize metrics and logs in real-time.

The adoption of observability in distributed systems brings forth a multitude of benefits. It empowers engineers and DevOps teams to proactively detect and diagnose issues, leading to faster troubleshooting and reduced downtime. Observability also aids in capacity planning, resource optimization, and identifying performance bottlenecks. Moreover, it facilitates collaboration between teams by providing a shared understanding of the system's behavior and enabling effective communication.

In the ever-evolving landscape of distributed systems, observability plays a pivotal role in unraveling the complexity and gaining insights into system behavior. By leveraging the power of logs, metrics, and traces, along with robust tools and frameworks, engineers can navigate the intricate world of distributed systems with confidence. Embracing observability empowers organizations to build resilient, high-performing systems that can withstand the challenges of today's digital landscape.

Matt Conran

Highlights: Distributed Systems Observability

The Role of Distributed Systems

A – Several decades ago, only a handful of mission-critical services worldwide were required to meet the availability and reliability requirements of today’s always-on applications and APIs. In response to user demand, every application must be built to scale nearly instantly to accommodate the potential for rapid, viral growth. Almost every app built today—whether a mobile app for consumers or a backend payment system—must meet these constraints and requirements.

B – Inherently, distributed systems are more reliable due to their distributed nature. When appropriately designed software engineers build these systems, they can benefit from more scalable organizational models. There is, however, a price to pay for these advantages.

C – Designing, building, and debugging these distributed systems can be challenging. A reliable distributed system requires significantly more engineering skills than a single-machine application, such as a mobile app or a web frontend. Regardless, distributed systems are becoming increasingly important. There is a corresponding need for tools, patterns, and practices to build them.

D – As digital transformation accelerates, organizations adopt multicloud environments to drive secure innovation and achieve speed, scale, and agility. As a result, technology stacks are becoming increasingly complex and scalable. Today, even the most straightforward digital transaction is supported by an array of cloud-native services and platforms delivered by various providers. To improve user experience and resilience, IT and security teams must monitor and manage their applications.

**Key Components of Observability**

Observability in distributed systems typically relies on three pillars: logs, metrics, and traces. Logs provide detailed records of events within the system, offering context for debugging issues. Metrics offer quantitative data, such as CPU usage and request rates, allowing teams to monitor system health and performance over time. Traces enable the tracking of requests as they move through the system, helping to pinpoint where latency or failures occur. Together, these components create a comprehensive picture of the system’s state and behavior.

**Challenges in Achieving Observability**

While observability is essential, achieving it in distributed systems is not without its challenges. The sheer volume of data generated by these systems can be overwhelming. Additionally, correlating data from disparate sources to form a cohesive narrative requires sophisticated tools and techniques. Moreover, ensuring that observability doesn’t introduce too much overhead or affect system performance is a delicate balancing act. Organizations must invest in the right infrastructure and expertise to tackle these challenges effectively.

**Best Practices for Enhancing Observability**

To maximize observability in distributed systems, organizations should adopt several best practices. Firstly, they should implement centralized logging and monitoring solutions that can aggregate data from all system components. Secondly, leveraging open standards like OpenTelemetry can facilitate consistent data collection and integration with various tools. Thirdly, incorporating automated alerting and anomaly detection can help teams proactively address issues before they impact users. Lastly, fostering a culture of collaboration between development and operations teams can ensure that observability is an ongoing, shared responsibility.

Cloud Service Mesh

### What is a Cloud Service Mesh?

A Cloud Service Mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that facilitates service-to-service communication in a microservices architecture. It abstracts the complex communication patterns between services into a manageable, secure, and observable framework. By deploying a service mesh, organizations can effectively manage the interactions of their microservices, ensuring seamless connectivity, security, and resilience.

### Key Benefits of Implementing a Cloud Service Mesh

1. **Enhanced Security**: A service mesh provides robust security features such as mutual TLS authentication, which encrypts communications between services. This ensures that data remains secure and tamper-proof as it travels across the network.

2. **Traffic Management**: With a service mesh, you can implement sophisticated traffic management policies, including load balancing, circuit breaking, and retries. This leads to improved performance and reliability of your distributed systems.

3. **Observability**: One of the standout features of a service mesh is its ability to provide deep observability into the interactions between services. Metrics, logs, and traces are collected and analyzed, offering invaluable insights into system health and performance.

### Enhancing Observability in Distributed Systems

Observability is a key concern in managing distributed systems. With the proliferation of microservices, tracking and understanding service interactions can become overwhelmingly complex. A Cloud Service Mesh addresses this challenge by offering comprehensive observability features:

– **Metrics Collection**: Collects real-time metrics on service performance, latency, error rates, and more.

– **Distributed Tracing**: Enables tracing of requests as they propagate through multiple services, helping identify bottlenecks and performance issues.

– **Centralized Logging**: Aggregates logs from various services, providing a unified view for easier troubleshooting and analysis.

These capabilities empower teams to detect issues early, optimize performance, and ensure the reliability of their applications.

### Real-World Applications and Use Cases

Several organizations have successfully implemented Cloud Service Meshes to transform their operations. For instance, financial institutions use service meshes to secure sensitive transactions, while e-commerce platforms leverage them to manage high traffic volumes during peak shopping seasons. By providing a robust framework for service communication, a service mesh enhances scalability, reliability, and security across industries.

Googles Ops Agent

Ops Agent is a lightweight agent that runs on your Compute Engine instances, collecting and forwarding metrics and logs to Google Cloud Monitoring and Logging. By installing Ops Agent on your instances, you gain real-time visibility into your Compute Engine’s performance and behavior.

To start monitoring your Compute Engine, you must install Ops Agent on your instances. The installation process is straightforward and can be done manually or through automation tools like Cloud Deployment Manager or Terraform. Once installed, the Ops Agent will automatically begin collecting metrics and logs from your Compute Engine.

Ops Agent allows you to customize the metrics and logs you want to monitor for your Compute Engine. Various options are available, allowing you to choose specific metrics and logs relevant to your application or system. By configuring metrics and logs, you can gain deeper insights and track the performance of critical components.

**Challenge: Fragmented Monitoring Tools**

Fragmented monitoring tools and manual analytics strategies challenge IT and security teams. The lack of a single source of truth and real-time insight makes it increasingly difficult for these teams to access the answers they need to accelerate innovation and optimize digital services. To gain insight, they must manually query data from various monitoring tools and piece together different sources of information.

This complex and time-consuming process distracts Team members from driving innovation and creating new value for the business and customers. In addition, many teams monitor only their mission-critical applications due to the effort involved in managing all these tools, platforms, and dashboards. The result is a multitude of blind spots across the technology stack, which makes it harder for teams to gain insights.

**Challenge: Kubernetes is Complex**

Understanding how Kubernetes adds to the complexity of technology stacks is imperative. In the drive toward modern technology stacks, it is the platform of choice for organizations refactoring their applications for the cloud-native world. Through dynamic resource provisioning, Kubernetes architectures can quickly scale services to new users and increase efficiency.

However, the constant changes in cloud environments make it difficult for IT and security teams to maintain visibility into them. To provide observability in their Kubernetes environments, these teams cannot manually configure various traditional monitoring tools. The result is that they are often unable to gain real-time insights to improve user experience, optimize costs, and strengthen security. Due to this visibility challenge, many organizations are delaying moving more mission-critical services to Kubernetes.

GKE-Native Monitoring

The Basics of GKE-Native Monitoring

GKE-Native Monitoring is a comprehensive monitoring solution provided by Google Cloud Platform (GCP) designed explicitly for GKE clusters. It offers deep insights into your applications’ performance and behavior, allowing you to proactively detect and resolve issues. With GKE-Native Monitoring, you can easily collect and analyze metrics, monitor logs, and set up alerts to ensure the reliability and availability of your applications.

One of the critical features of GKE-Native Monitoring is its ability to collect and analyze metrics from your GKE clusters. It provides preconfigured dashboards that display essential metrics such as CPU usage, memory utilization, and network traffic. Additionally, you can create custom dashboards tailored to your specific requirements, allowing you better to understand your application’s performance and resource consumption.

The Role of Megatrends

We have had a considerable drive with innovation that has spawned several megatrends that have affected how we manage and view our network infrastructure and the need for distributed systems observability. We have seen the decomposition of everything from one to many.

Many services and dependencies in multiple locations, aka microservices observability, must be managed and operated instead of the monolithic where everything is generally housed internally. The megatrends have resulted in a dynamic infrastructure with new failure modes not seen in the monolithic, forcing us to look at different systems observability tools and network visibility practices. 

Shift in Control

There has also been a shift in the point of control. As we move towards new technologies, many of these loosely coupled services or infrastructures your services depend on are not under your control. The edge of control has been pushed, creating different network and security perimeters. These parameters are now closer to the workload than a central security stack. Therefore, the workloads themselves are concerned with security.

Example Product: Cisco AppDynamics

### What is Cisco AppDynamics?

Cisco AppDynamics is an application performance management (APM) solution designed to provide real-time visibility into the performance of your applications. It helps IT professionals identify bottlenecks, diagnose issues, and optimize performance, ensuring a seamless user experience. With its powerful analytics, you can gain deep insights into your application stack, from the user interface to the backend infrastructure.

### Key Features and Capabilities

#### Real-Time Monitoring

One of the standout features of Cisco AppDynamics is its ability to monitor applications in real-time. This allows IT teams to detect and resolve issues as they occur, minimizing downtime and ensuring a smooth user experience. Real-time monitoring covers everything from user interactions to server performance, providing a comprehensive view of your application’s health.

#### End-User Experience Monitoring

Understanding how users interact with your application is crucial for delivering a high-quality experience. Cisco AppDynamics offers end-user experience monitoring, which tracks user sessions and interactions. This data helps you identify any pain points or performance issues that may be affecting user satisfaction.

#### Business Transaction Monitoring

Cisco AppDynamics takes a unique approach to monitoring by focusing on business transactions. By tracking the performance of individual transactions, you can gain a clearer understanding of how different parts of your application are performing. This level of granularity allows for more targeted optimizations and quicker issue resolution.

### Benefits of Using Cisco AppDynamics

#### Improved Application Performance

With its comprehensive monitoring and diagnostic capabilities, Cisco AppDynamics helps you identify and resolve performance issues quickly. This leads to faster load times, fewer errors, and an overall improved user experience.

#### Enhanced Operational Efficiency

By automating many of the monitoring and diagnostic processes, Cisco AppDynamics reduces the workload on your IT team. This allows them to focus on more strategic initiatives, driving greater value for your business.

#### Better Decision Making

The insights provided by Cisco AppDynamics enable better decision-making at all levels of your organization. Whether you’re looking to optimize resource allocation or plan for future growth, the data and analytics provided can inform your strategies and drive better outcomes.

### Integrations and Flexibility

Cisco AppDynamics offers seamless integrations with a wide range of third-party tools and platforms. Whether you’re using cloud services like AWS and Azure or CI/CD tools like Jenkins and GitHub, AppDynamics can integrate into your existing workflows, providing a unified view of your application’s performance.

For pre-information, you may find the following posts helpful:

  1. Observability vs Monitoring 
  2. Prometheus Monitoring
  3. Network Functions

Distributed Systems Observability

Distributed Systems

Today’s world of always-on applications and APIs has availability and reliability requirements that would have been needed of solely a handful of mission-critical services around the globe only a few decades ago. Likewise, the potential for rapid, viral service growth means that every application has to be built to scale nearly instantly in response to user demand.

Finally, these constraints and requirements mean that almost every application made—whether a consumer mobile app or a backend payments application—needs to be a distributed system. A distributed system is an environment where different components are spread across multiple computers on a network. These devices split up the work, harmonizing their efforts to complete the job more efficiently than if a single device had been responsible.

**The Key Components of Observability**

Observability in distributed systems is achieved through three main components: monitoring, logging, and tracing.

1. Monitoring: Monitoring involves continuously collecting and analyzing system metrics and performance indicators. It provides real-time visibility into the health and performance of the distributed system. By monitoring various metrics such as CPU usage, memory consumption, network traffic, and response times, engineers can proactively identify anomalies and make informed decisions to optimize system performance.

2. Logging: Logging involves recording events, activities, and errors within the distributed system. Log data provides a historical record that can be analyzed to understand system behavior and debug issues. Distributed systems generate vast amounts of log data, and effective log management practices, such as centralized log storage and log aggregation, are crucial for efficient troubleshooting.

3. Tracing: Tracing involves capturing the flow of requests and interactions between different distributed system components. It allows engineers to trace the journey of a specific request and identify potential bottlenecks or performance issues. Tracing is particularly useful in complex distributed architectures where multiple services interact.

**Benefits of Observability in Distributed Systems**

Adopting observability practices in distributed systems offers several benefits:

1. Enhanced Troubleshooting: Observability enables engineers to quickly identify and resolve issues by providing detailed insights into system behavior. With real-time monitoring, log analysis, and tracing capabilities, engineers can pinpoint the root cause of problems and take appropriate actions, minimizing downtime and improving system reliability.

2. Performance Optimization: By closely monitoring system metrics, engineers can identify performance bottlenecks and optimize system resources. Observability allows for proactive capacity planning and efficient resource allocation, ensuring optimal performance even under high loads.

3. Efficient Change Management: Observability facilitates monitoring system changes and their impact on overall performance. Engineers can track changes in metrics and easily identify any deviations or anomalies caused by updates or configuration changes. This helps maintain system stability and avoid unexpected issues.

What are VPC Flow Logs?

VPC Flow Logs is a feature offered by Google Cloud that captures and records network traffic information within Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networks. Each network flow is logged, providing a comprehensive view of the traffic traversing. These logs include valuable information such as source and destination IP addresses, ports, protocol, and packet counts.

Once the VPC Flow Logs are enabled and data is being recorded, we can start leveraging the power of analysis. Google Cloud provides several tools and services for analyzing VPC Flow Logs. One such tool is BigQuery, a scalable and flexible data warehouse. By exporting VPC Flow Logs to BigQuery, we can perform complex queries, visualize traffic patterns, and detect anomalies using industry-standard SQL queries.

**How This Affects Failures**

The primary issue I have seen with my clients is that application failures are no longer predictable, and dynamic systems can fail creatively, challenging existing monitoring solutions. But, more importantly, the practices that support them. We have a lot of partial failures that are not just unexpected but not known or have never been seen before. For example, if you recall, we have the network hero. 

**The network Hero**

It is someone who knows every part of the network and has seen every failure at least once. These people are no longer helpful in today’s world and need proper Observation. When I was working as an Engineer, we would have plenty of failures, but more than likely, we would have seen them before. And there was a system in place to fix the error. Today’s environment is much different.

We can no longer rely on simply seeing a UP or Down, setting static thresholds, and then alerting based on those thresholds. A key point to note at this stage is that none of these thresholds considers the customer’s perspective.  If your POD runs at 80% CPU, does that mean the customer is unhappy?

When monitoring, you should look from your customer’s perspectives and what matters to them. Content Delivery Network (CDN) was one of the first to realize this game and measure what matters most to the customer.

Distributed Systems Observability

The different demands

So, the new, modern, and complex distributed systems place very different demands on your infrastructure and the people who manage it. For example, in microservices, there can be several problems with a particular microservice:

    • The microservices could be running under high resource utilization and, therefore, slow to respond, causing a timeout
    • The microservices could have crashed or been stopped and is, therefore, unavailable
    • The microservices could be fine, but there could be slow-running database queries.
    • So we have a lot of partial failures. 

Consequently, We can no longer predict

The significant shift we see with software platforms is that they evolve much quicker than the products and paradigms we use to monitor them. As a result, we need to consider new practices and technologies with dedicated platform teams and sound system observability. We can’t predict anything anymore, which puts the brakes on some traditional monitoring approaches, especially the metrics-based approach to monitoring.

I’m not saying that these monitoring tools are not doing what you want them to do. But, they work in a siloed environment, and there is a lack of connectivity. So we have monitoring tools working in silos in different parts of the organization and more than likely managed by other people trying to monitor a very dispersed application with multiple components and services in various places. 

Relying On Known Failures

Metric-Based Approach

A metrics-based monitoring approach relies on having previously encountered known failure modes. The metric-based approach relies on known failures and predictable failure modes. So, we have predictable thresholds that someone is considered to experience abnormal.

Monitoring can detect when these systems are either over or under the predictable thresholds that were previously set. Then, we can set alerts, and we hope that these alerts are actionable. This is only useful for variants of predictable failure modes.

Traditional metrics and monitoring tools can tell you any performance spikes or notice that a problem occurs. But they don’t let you dig into the source of the issues and let us slice and dice or see correlations between errors. If the system is complex, this approach is more challenging in getting to the root cause in a reasonable timeframe.

Google Cloud Trace

Example: Application Latency & Cloud Trace

Before we discuss Cloud Trace’s specifics, let’s establish a clear understanding of application latency. Latency refers to the time delay between a user’s action or request and the corresponding response from the application. It includes network latency, server processing time, and database query execution time. By comprehending the different factors contributing to latency, developers can proactively optimize their applications for improved performance.

Google Cloud Trace is a powerful diagnostic tool offered by Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that enables developers to identify and analyze application latency bottlenecks. It provides detailed insights into the flow of requests and events within an application, allowing developers to pinpoint areas of concern and optimize accordingly. Cloud Trace integrates seamlessly with other GCP services and provides a comprehensive view of latency across various components of an application stack.

Traditional style metrics systems

With traditional metrics systems, you had to define custom metrics, which were always defined upfront. This approach prevents us from starting to ask new questions about problems. So, it would be best to determine the questions to ask upfront.

Then, we set performance thresholds, pronounce them “good” or “bad, ” and check and re-check those thresholds. We would tweak the thresholds over time, but that was about it. This monitoring style has been the de facto approach, but we don’t now want to predict how a system can fail. Always observe instead of waiting for problems, such as reaching a certain threshold before acting.

**Metrics: Lack of connective event**

The metrics did not retain the connective event, so you cannot ask new questions in the existing dataset. These traditional system metrics could miss unexpected failure modes in complex distributed systems. Also, the condition detected via system metrics might be unrelated to what is happening.

An example of this could be an odd number of running threads on one component, which might indicate garbage collection is in progress or that slow response times are imminent in an upstream service.

**Users experience static thresholds**

User experience means different things to different sets of users. We now have a model where different service users may be routed through the system in other ways, using various components and providing experiences that can vary widely. We also know now that the services no longer tend to break in the same few predictable ways over and over.  

We should have a few alerts triggered by only focusing on symptoms that directly impact user experience and not because a threshold was reached.

The Challenge: Can’t reliably indicate any issues with user experience

If you use static thresholds, they can’t reliably indicate any issues with user experience. Alerts should be set up to detect failures that impact user experience. Traditional monitoring falls short in this regard. With traditional metrics-based monitoring, we rely on static thresholds to define optimal system conditions, which have nothing to do with user experience.

However, modern systems change shape dynamically under different workloads. Static monitoring thresholds can’t reflect impacts on user experience. They lack context and are too coarse.

Required: Distributed Systems Observability

Systems observability and reliability in distributed systems are practices. Rather than just focusing on a tool that logs, metrics, or alters, Observability is all about how you approach problems, and for this, you need to look at your culture. So you could say that Observability is a cultural practice that allows you to be proactive about findings instead of relying on a reactive approach that we are used to in the past.

Nowadays, we need a different viewpoint and want to see everything from one place. You want to know how the application works and how it interacts with the other infrastructure components, such as the underlying servers, physical or server, the network, and how data transfer looks in a transfer and stale state. 

Levels of Abstraction

What level of observation is needed to ensure everything performs as it should? What should you look at to obtain this level of detail?

Monitoring is knowing the data points and the entities from which we gather information. On the other hand, Observability is like putting all the data together. So monitoring is collecting data, and Observability is putting it together in one single pane of glass. Observability is observing the different patterns and deviations from the baseline; monitoring is getting the data and putting it into the systems. A vital part of an Observability toolkit is service level objectives (slos).

**Preference: Distributed Tracing**

We have three pillars of Systems Observability. There are Metrics, Traces, and Logging. So, defining or viewing Observability as having these pillars is an oversimplification. But for Observability, you need these in place. Observability is all about connecting the dots from each of these pillars.

If someone asked me which one I prefer, it would be distributed tracing. Distributed tracing allows you to visualize each step in service request executions. As a result, it doesn’t matter if services have complex dependencies. You could say that the complexity of the Dynamic systems is abstracted with distributed tracing.

**Use Case: Challenges without tracing**

For example, latency can stack up if a downstream database service experiences performance bottlenecks, resulting in high end-to-end latency. When latency is detected three or four layers upstream, it can be complicated to identify which component of the system is the root of the problem because now that same latency is being seen in dozens of other services.

**Distributed tracing: A winning formula**

Modern distributed systems tend to scale into a tangled knot of dependencies. Therefore, distributed tracing shows the relationships between various services and components in a distributed system. Traces help you understand system interdependencies. Unfortunately, those inter-dependencies can obscure problems and make them challenging to debug unless their relationships are clearly understood.

In distributed systems, observability is vital in ensuring complex architectures’ stability, performance, and reliability. Monitoring, logging, and tracing provide engineers with the tools to understand system behavior, troubleshoot issues, and optimize performance. By adopting observability practices, organizations can effectively manage their distributed systems and provide seamless and reliable services to their users.

Summary: Distributed Systems Observability

In the vast landscape of distributed systems, observability is crucial in ensuring their reliable and efficient functioning. This blogpost aims to delve into the critical components of distributed systems observability and shed light on their significance.

Telemetry

Telemetry forms the foundation of observability in distributed systems. It involves collecting, processing, and analyzing various metrics, logs, and traces. By monitoring and measuring these data points, developers gain valuable insights into the performance and behavior of their distributed systems.

Logging

Logging is an essential component of observability, providing a detailed record of events and activities within a distributed system. It captures important information such as errors, warnings, and informational messages, which aids in troubleshooting and debugging. Properly implemented logging mechanisms enable developers to identify and resolve issues promptly.

Metrics

Metrics are quantifiable measurements that provide a high-level view of the health and performance of a distributed system. They offer valuable insights into resource utilization, throughput, latency, error rates, and other critical indicators. By monitoring and analyzing metrics, developers can proactively identify bottlenecks, optimize performance, and ensure the smooth operation of their systems.

Tracing

Tracing allows developers to understand the flow and behavior of requests as they traverse through a distributed system. It provides detailed information about the path a request takes, including the various services and components it interacts with. Tracing is instrumental in diagnosing and resolving performance issues, as it highlights potential latency hotspots and bottlenecks.

Alerting and Visualization

Alerting mechanisms and visualization tools are vital for effective observability in distributed systems. Alerts notify developers when certain predefined thresholds or conditions are met, enabling them to take timely action. Visualization tools provide intuitive and comprehensive representations of system metrics, logs, and traces, making identifying patterns, trends, and anomalies easier.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the key components of distributed systems observability, namely telemetry, logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, and visualization, form a comprehensive toolkit for monitoring and understanding the intricacies of such systems. By leveraging these components effectively, developers can ensure their distributed systems’ reliability, performance, and scalability.