In the modern digital landscape, organizations are moving their operations to the cloud using the services of platforms like AWS, GCP and Azure. This direction is expected to bring scalability, flexibility and cost-effectiveness. However, it also brings in some challenges, including more complexity. With this complexity comes the need for observability to have smooth and efficient operations. Whether it is pure cloud or a hybrid environment, there is still a struggle to get full visibility across all layers of the technology stack. This is where full-stack observability comes into play. Understanding observability Observability is not just monitoring. Traditional monitoring may be limited to predefined metrics and logs, while observability is about collecting and analyzing as much data as possible. Observability extends beyond traditional monitoring by considering the complete flow of data and communication through the entire system, including user interfaces, the infrastructure and external dependencies. Data from metrics, logs, traces and events from all components and layers of a system can give you a holistic understanding of its behavior, performance and health. When carried out in the development and testing stages, observability helps to reveal problems in an early stage, which can be then fixed before the product is released to production. End-to-end observability not only eliminates silos but allows an organization to detect problems, diagnose them, improve performance, address security risks and gain insights into how systems and applications should optimally perform. Challenges in cloud and hybrid environments Cloud environments introduce unique challenges that make full-stack observability mandatory: Scalable and momentary infrastructure: Cloud resources are quite dynamic, in that they can be quickly scaled up and down depending on the demand. Traditional monitoring tools struggle to keep up with this dynamic nature, which is why it’s crucial to have observability solutions that can adapt quickly to such changes. Microservices and distributed architectures: Modern applications are being increasingly built using microservices architecture, where functionality is split across several services. This architecture makes scalability and resilience possible. It also increases the complexity. Observability enables you to track requests across services, identify the bottlenecks or simply debug a failure. Multicloud and hybrid cloud strategies: Many organizations are using multi cloud or hybrid cloud strategies because of their nature to prevent dependence on one vendor and provide a backup. Full-stack observability provides a single view across these cloud environments, ensuring consistent performance and reliability. Identifying the gap in PaaS and FaaS environments Traditional monitoring tools do not provide the required functionality to obtain information on cloud-native application platforms based on platforms as a service (PaaS), functions as a service (FaaS), and software as a service (SaaS), and containerized environments such as Kubernetes. These types of tools serve their purpose with infrastructure as a service (IaaS). But they are not effective enough for end-to-end monitoring of the complex and constantly changing PaaS and FaaS environments. They cause challenges in finding the root causes of any issues. These higher-level services can only be provided if you have deep insights into the application layer, user interactions and platform services. Adhering to SLAs is critical, but it cannot be done at the cost of further consuming cloud resources. Monitoring infrastructure alone does not close this gap, but full-stack observability does this by offering detailed visibility and insights. Making observability mandatory: A roadmap for the journey When cloud implementations were becoming popular, observability was not considered to be essential. It was seen as an add-on. As the needs of cloud environments have become more demanding, the need for observability has become more pressing. Today, it is not only mandatory for performance and security requirements but also for business requirements such as to track business metrics, KPI’s, Service Level Objectives (SLOs), detect process anomalies and prioritize optimization opportunities within business processes. This allows the business to understand and report on business health from executive overviews all the way down to the granular details to allow and prioritize improvements and automate remediations based upon measurable business impact. Insights and recommendations in costs and carbon footprint help to reduce cloud cost and IT carbon emissions. Observability at your fingertips Global technology company, Dynatrace provides a software observability platform based on artificial intelligence and automation. With its comprehensive observability capabilities, end-users can achieve both high performance and robust security. Some of its benefits include auto-ticketing, CMDB updates and automated remediation, helping customers to shift right seamlessly. This highlights the importance of real-time application, business data and user experience insights. The Dynatrace platform also enables organizations to mature as they transform from proactive to predictive monitoring, moving further toward semiautonomous AIOps. Beyond CloudOps, DevOps automation is the next step to further maturity. This encompasses fixing defects, deploying more frequently and removing manual gates through CI/CD. This is known as the shift-left approach whose core concept is to begin observability as early as possible in the software development life cycle. Dynatrace plays a huge role in shift-left by giving developers a detailed view on how the application behaves and where it may be experiencing issues. The issues could include bottlenecks that stall any code that is developed. Insights from Dynatrace help the developers, and allow them to instantly debug, to make sure that code generated is secure from the start. With its Grail Data Lake, Dynatrace aims to provide new data lakehouse technology for enhanced observability, security, and business analytics. At Eviden, I’m part of the observability team that makes sure we leverage the Dynatrace capabilities as part of our Cloud and in our application modernization services offerings for our clients. Combining digital transformation leader, Eviden with Dynatrace offers your organization a unique opportunity to realize scalability, flexibility and cost-effectiveness with full-stack observability. Connect with me to learn more about the need for observability and how it can help your business. Learn more about Eviden’s observability solutions.