This article was originally published in APM Digest here. Multicasting in this context refers to the process of directing data streams to two or more destinations. This might look like sending the same telemetry data to both an on-premises storage system and a cloud-based observability platform concurrently. The two principal benefits of this strategy are cost savings and service redundancy.

Dynamic observability is the concept that the amount of data collected should scale based on signals from your environment. Elastic infrastructure is not a new concept. Much of the internet is powered by services that provision more resources based on signals derived from metrics like cpu load, memory utilization and queue depth. If we can use tools to right size our infrastructure, why can’t we also use tools to right size the amount of data we collect?