Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Observability tools are crucial to the success of most IT infrastructures and services. This software allows users to quickly track key metrics across all services and applications. By peering into key network metrics, these tools give users detailed real-time data about a system.

I come from the database world where observability, or monitoring as we used to call it, was always really important to keep databases up and running and operating well. Thousands of data points would be collected and displayed in countless graphs. As an expert DBA, you can see every detail about internal database operations and feel very good about yourself being able to put all this data together and resolve the puzzle.

In the current cloud-native era, almost every organization has one or more Kubernetes clusters in their production infrastructures. However, only a small percentage of companies, especially enterprise-level ones, can claim that they are fully committed to running everything exclusively on Kubernetes. The most typical scenario is that new stateless services are deployed on Kubernetes, while legacy applications, third-party services, and databases continue to run on dedicated VMs or bare-metal nodes.

Editor’s Note: This is the third installment of a series of blog posts previewing our State of Observability 2024 survey report. So far in this blog series, we’ve looked at where enterprises and MSPs are in their observability journeys and the benefits and challenges of their observability deployments. This week, we look at whether the observability story so far is more about replacing or enhancing existing IT management tools.

One service can’t connect to another (or can’t establish a database connection) – underneath this simple definition, there can be two very different conditions. First – we may have a service process down. In this case, the Kernel stack is operational, so we are getting the packet back, indicating the connection was refused. Second – when network flow is completely disrupted due to connectivity issues, firewall, or a node being completely down.