Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Classically, the space of observability lies within layers of information on a dashboard. It operates by using the fundamental trio of data — metrics, logs and traces — from each layer of the environment to assess the health of an IT infrastructure. However, a time component is critical, making the stack observable at any point in time. Gathering reliable data and insights into your IT infrastructure remains the primary role of observability tools and services.

A prelude to our upcoming six-part Observability Maturity Model Fundamentals blog series. By Lodewijk Bogaards At StackState, we have spent eight years in the monitoring and observability spaces. During this time, we have spoken with countless DevOps engineers, architects, SREs, heads of IT operations and CTOs, and we have heard the same struggles over and over.

Technically speaking, observability offers visibility into the data being generated by your infrastructure devices, systems, and applications — but in reality, it offers the opportunity to see what’s happening, There’s no guarantee that you’ll get what you want; you have to set things up in a way that makes it possible for you to get the insights you need.

It’s no secret that CI/CD pipelines make the lives of engineering and operations easier by accelerating the feedback loop for higher quality code and apps. They build code, run tests, and safely deploy new versions of your application. But just like any aspect of development, poor integration, invisible bottlenecks, and bugs can plague your pipelines. And debugging them? Well, it’s complicated.

It’s already September! Time flies by when you’re getting things done, and we’ve been a busy bunch of bees here at Honeycomb. 🐝 We’re excited that we’ve gotten to share some of those changes with you already, like our relaunched interactive sandbox and the beta release of our OpenTelemetry log support and Go distribution, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

We recently hosted a Twitter Space, and a question came in regarding speaking to executives about instrumenting for observability. It’s a great topic we love expanding on. Here’s the answer we provided.