Great DevOps teams find new ways to close gaps in dynamic, ever-changing work environments. Whether that’s the gap between performance and reliability or development and operations, DevOps is in a constant state of evolution.

To continue delivering quickly and consistently in a world of increasingly complex tech systems, engineers must be able to pinpoint issues in the development chain. Observability makes this possible.

What is Observability?

Observability is a way of understanding a system’s internal state based on its external outputs and events. Say you had an application deployed in the cloud – a DevOps team would use observability practices to monitor various aspects of the app, like server performance, application logs, database queries, or user interactions. If the application slows down, teams can analyze these metrics to recognize the cause.

This approach enables DevOps teams to proactively measure (and ultimately, optimize) application performance over time. As systems become more sophisticated, it tends to get harder to make sense of observability.

Here at Trust in SODA, we’ve had the pleasure of working with many great engineers from our Women in DevOps community and beyond, and we’ve seen the benefits of good observability first-hand. Want to enhance your DevOps function? Here’s how to boost your observability efforts.

Distributed Tracing

Distributed tracing tracks requests across microservices within an application, enabling you to visualize the entire journey. By following the request flow, you can uncover issues like bottlenecking and high network latency over multiple services, which can be very tough to do via traditional monitoring methods. Distributed tracing through OpenTelemetry can help you simplify the integration process.

Chaos Engineering

One of the punchier sounding titles on the list, chaos engineering is the practice of introducing controlled disruptions into the system. Why? To improve your system’s resilience and monitor its response to threats. By proactively testing threats, you’ll have an easier time reinforcing your system’s lines of defense. Proceed with caution!

Real User Monitoring (RUM)

RUM is a tasty way to analyze every user transaction between applications. This technique provides data on real-world, user-centric issues (unlike traditional health-monitoring methods that might fail to grasp the nuance of the user experience).

Live Code Profiling

A targeted approach inside the broader observability strategy, live code profiling can be used to better understand resource usage and identify potential performance issues in production. This can allow you to observe real-world behavior (which can be profoundly different from artificial testing environments) and gain insight from human interaction, possibly revealing unforeseen bottlenecks in the process.

Support from Trust in SODA

You’ve got the techniques, but have you got the people to implement them? Top DevOps talent is hard to come by in today’s climate, it’s partly why we’ve spent so long building the incredible Women in DevOps community. We want to create access to opportunities for diverse tech talent everywhere – the future of technological innovation depends on it.

Contact the team today to hear more about our community-led recruitment solutions:

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