Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Although conversation about observability often ignores SREs, SREs have a central role to play in observability success.

There’s no strict definition of a distributed system. But generally speaking, if you have reached a point where you’re running more than five interdependent services at once, that means you’re running a distributed system. It also means you are more than likely experiencing difficulties when troubleshooting using traditional debugging tools. Unfortunately, pulling up multiple tools, each built for a monolithic world, doesn’t help pinpoint the problem.

Systems run into problems all the time. To keep things running smoothly, we need to have an error monitoring and logging system to help us discover and resolve whatever issue that may arise as soon as possible. The bigger the system the more challenging it becomes to monitor it and pinpoint the issue. And with serverless systems with 100s of services running concurrently, monitoring and troubleshooting are even more challenging tasks.

In the first post of this series, we covered the general idea and benefits of model-driven observability with Juju. In the second post, we dived into the Juju topology and its benefits with respect to entity stability and metrics continuity. In this post, we discuss how the Juju topology enables grouping and management of alerts, helps prevent alert storms, and how that relates with SRE practices.

Over the years, we’ve heard many versions of the same familiar story: large businesses struggling with observability data living in several different systems. At Grafana Labs, our “big tent” philosophy is based on the belief that our users should determine their own observability strategy and choose their own tools. Grafana allows them to bring together and understand all their data, no matter where it lives.

As I said before, Speed is King. Business requirements for applications and architecture change all the time, driven by changes in customer needs, competition, and innovation and this only seems to be accelerating. Application developers must not be the blocker to business. We need business changes at the speed of life, not at the speed of software development.