1.1. Observability Overview¶
Observability exists at the same time software was born. Recent years, the adoption of microservices and AI technology makes performance monitoring more important then ever before. Now Observability has become the same important as scalibility, availability. In CNCF Cloud Native Interactive Landscape, Observability and Analysis is one of the largest categories.
1.1.1. What is Observability?¶
Observability is a system characteristic describing the degree to which a system can be understood from its external outputs. Measured by CPU time, memory, disk space, latency, errors, etc., computer systems can be more or less observable. To ensure there is no service disruption, you’ll need to observe and analyze every aspect of your application so every anomaly gets detected and rectified right away.
1.1.2. History Of Observability¶
Observability exists when software was born but the word observability becomes popular is something after microservices became a de-facto industry standard.
At the early stage of software industry, people need to catch the exceptions and related information when software runs so that they can debug and improve the quality of the software. At the very early stage, the software system will generate dump file, or some plain-text format log file. Those files are the result of the most primitive logging and monitoring system. Even today, we still use core dump file for debugging and root-causing. Later on, as the software system becomes more and more complicated, software performance becomes the main problem. The focus of system logging and monitoring swiched from exception analysis to performance analysis. This makes APM(application performance management) becomes an indisposable tool for large scale software system. APM is mainly used to detect and analyze the performance issue of application system. It can help developers and operation team to pinpoint the root cause and resolve the issues quickly, so that the service level objectives can be met. Application performance management is so important that it has become a business line for many companies such as IBM, Elastic.io and OCI(Oracle Cloud Infrastructure).