Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Meeting the goal of delivering great performance and reliability in the face of our ever-changing, increasingly autonomous IT environments is fundamentally challenged by a data problem. Sure, there’s lots of it - logs, metrics, and APM traces - but it is exceedingly hard to extract actionable information when there are so many fast moving parts.

De Watergroep is responsible for the supply of water to more than 3 million customers and hundreds of companies in Belgium. An organisation operating in the public sector, De Watergroep's main goal is to continuously ensure the availability of high-quality drinking water. De Watergroep also is constantly engaged in technological innovation, focusing on keeping distribution costs low, and making maintenance more cost efficient.

Starting today, Honeycomb Metrics is now generally available to all Enterprise customers. You’ve adopted our event-based observability practices, in part to overcome the debugging roadblocks you hit when using custom metrics to identify application issues. But metrics do still provide value at the systems level. Now, you can easily see and use your metrics data alongside your event data in Honeycomb—all in one interface.

Open Telemetry represents an effort to combine distributed tracing, metrics and logging into a single set of system components and language-specific libraries. Recently, OpenTelemetry became a CNCF incubating project, but it already enjoys quite a significant community and vendor support. OpenTelemetry defines itself as “an observability framework for cloud-native software”, although it should be able to cover more than what we know as “cloud-native software”.

Observability data, and especially log data, is immensely valuable for modern business. Making the right decision—from monitoring the bits and bytes of application code to the actions in the security incident response center—requires the right people to generate insights from data as fast as possible.

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