What’s Standing In The Way Of Observability?

Observability tools are essential resources for programmers and system designers, providing insight into how products function. With these tools in place, designers can quickly identify bugs, isolate errors, and rapidly create solutions to software issues.

“Observability” is a term used to describe the ability to monitor and analyze data from your application. This includes things such as metrics, logs, traces, and performance counters.

Many different observability solutions are available today, but not all of them work for all use cases.

What Is Observability?

In computer science, “observability” refers to a system’s or application’s openness to observation and monitoring by other systems. A highly observable application will provide data that designers can use for improvements or repairs.

Observability is based on three pillars: metrics, tracing, and logs. Time-elapsed metrics provide quantitative information about when errors and other occurrences happen.

Tracing records information about the execution of your code so that you can understand where a bug emerged. Finally, logs record events in your application so that you can troubleshoot issues later.

Metrics

Metrics are numbers that measure how long something takes. They’re used to track progress and help you determine whether or not something is working correctly.

Suppose, for instance, that you’re interested in tracking the frequency of a user’s button clicks. It would be possible to keep track of the number of times the user has clicked the button with the use of a counter variable.

If you wanted to know how fast they clicked the button, you could add another counter variable to count the number of milliseconds that had elapsed since the last click.

Tracing

Tracing any function that records information about the execution of code. This data helps you understand what happens inside your program and why it behaves the way it does.

An easy first step to increase observability would be to append logging statements to each function call. Using these, you may keep track of information like the function’s name, the arguments it received, and the value it returned.

Now, you can run your app and check the logs to see what functions are called and what values are returned. From there, you can narrow down the cause until you find the source of an error.

Logging

Logging functions record information about events that happen within your application. These records include errors, warnings, and informational messages.

You can use logging to write data to files, send emails, or stream records over the network.

You can also use logging to monitor your application’s performance. For example, you might want to know how often certain methods are called or how long it takes for them to finish executing.

Why Observability Matters

Observability is important because it gives you insight into what your software does, which allows you to improve customer experience. It lets you see what’s happening under the hood and figure out what needs to be fixed.

Observability tools allow you to make changes to your code without fear of affecting other parts of the program. It also allows you to solve issues before they become more serious.

Data provided by observability tools can also aid DevOps teams with monitoring their infrastructure. By observing your software’s behavior, they can spot potential issues before they affect users.

Finally, it means that you can easily debug any performance issues with your software.

Barriers to Observability

Every new technology has barriers to adoption, but some have more than others. Below are the primary reasons developers fail to adopt observability tools.

Performance

When we speak of performance, we are referring to the rate at which a task is completed. For example, if you’re writing a web server, performance describes how quickly requests are completed.

In most cases, performance isn’t a problem when using observability tools. However, trying to do things like record every single event that occurs in a system will probably slow things down.

In order to boost performance, your computer must be able to process all the instructions quickly enough to keep up with the speed at which your code executes.

Complexity

Complexity refers to the amount of work required to understand what’s going on in your code. It is more challenging to diagnose issues with a huge codebase.

Making your code easier to understand by breaking it up into smaller chunks is an excellent place to start. Each batch of code can be subject to its own battery of testing. This will allow you to pinpoint the exact causes of bugs and errors.

Why Observability Is Not More Commonly Used?

Observability is an incredibly useful tool. Despite this, observability is used less than other programming techniques.

One reason is that developers don’t always think about it when writing their code. Instead, they assume that if something goes wrong, they’ll notice it eventually.

As another factor, some individuals have the misconception that observability has little purpose outside of debugging. However, there are numerous contexts in which it proves to be rather useful.

Outside of debugging, observability gives you the insight to maximize performance, identify lags, and create the best user experience possible.

Overcoming the Barriers

Observability is not without its issues. Both of these problems, fortunately, have workable answers. To begin, you can utilize profilers and other tools to get a handle on things.

Second, you can split up your code into small components to make it easier to understand.

Third, you can use testing frameworks to automate the process of writing tests.

Once you do those three things, you’ll be able to reduce the complexity of your code and observe everything that goes on when it executes.

Observability Best Practices

Implementing best practices for observability from the beginning can also help you to overcome barriers and challenges.

As you attempt to achieve observability, you should give the following proposals some thought:

• Use Loggers

A logger is an object that records information about events that occur within your application. This can include errors, warnings, or even progress updates.

• Create Tests

You can check that your code behaves as intended by writing unit tests.

It also makes it easy to see whether anything has changed since you last tested it.

• Separate Concerns

Separating concerns allows you to focus on one thing at a time so you can write code that is shorter and more concise. Additionally, it clarifies everything so that anybody can understand what’s going on.

• Keep Your Code Simple

Keep your code simple by using fewer classes and methods. Also, try to avoid having too many dependencies between objects.

Key Takeaways

Observability is an essential tool for modern software development. Without it, you won’t have a clear view of what’s occurring in your code.

So, if you aren’t already, begin implementing observability strategies immediately.

However, keep in mind that observability can have some drawbacks. In addition to increasing complexity, some observability strategies can impact the performance of your system.

Before using observability, make sure that it’s implemented correctly.

Choose the Right Tool for the Job

Furthermore, with a precise observability solution, you will be able to observe what is happening in your code.

Choosing the right tool for your observability needs is crucial in successfully implementing an observability strategy. TelemetryHub is a tool that can provide incredible actionable insights into the workings of your complex system.

Click here to try TelemetryHub today.