3 years ago

According to Honeycomb, comprehensive observability is a method of collecting and analyzing unique, high-cardinality telemetry data in order to provide the full context for any given event, or service request. That data is shipped to a data backend where it can be analyzed to help debug or troubleshoot the many unforeseen and complex issues that arise in cloud native distributed systems, such as Kubernetes.

Observability thus constitutes “the ability to understand what is happening inside of your systems and to do so without having to push new code, using the existing instrumentation and data flowing out of those systems,” Liz Fong-Jones, principal developer advocate, for Honeycomb and a member of the governance committee of OpenTelemetry, said during The New Stack’s livestream podcast as part of its KubeCon + CloudNativeCon coverage.

The seemingly daunting abyss associated with the challenges of finding ways to improve and debug application performance in often hybrid and multicloud environments is partially due to the limitations of older generations of tools that were designed for the needs of monolithic systems. Wrangling that complexity and equipping teams to better, and more proactively, understand their cloud-native systems becomes manageable thanks to comprehensive observability.