Three Pillars of Observability: Working with Metrics, Logs, and Traces

Introduction To Observability Metrics

Modern software is complex, and with that complexity comes the challenges of monitoring and troubleshooting. As software becomes more distributed and complex, traditional monitoring doesn’t cut it. It requires robust observability strategies that go beyond just uptime checks.

What Is Observability?

Observability is the measure of how well the internal states of a system can be inferred from knowledge of its external outputs. Often confused with monitoring, observability goes a step further by identifying issues in a system and why those issues occur. It’s from control theory and has become super crucial in software engineering, especially with the rise of complex, distributed systems and microservices. Observability collects data from metrics, logs, and traces, the three pillars, to give a complete view of a system’s health and performance.

Need for Comprehensive Observability

Knowing a system is down isn’t enough in today's digital world. Companies must know why the system failed and how to fix it quickly. Observability gives teams actionable insight into system performance and health. This level of observability helps to:

• Less downtime: Faster detection and fixing means reduced downtime and more customer service.
• Better decisions: With visibility into system performance, management can make better decisions on resource allocation and strategic improvements.
• Develop and run faster: Developers and ops teams can catch bottlenecks or failures before they become big problems.
• Better customer experience: Smoother system operation means less customer friction and better service overall.

A good observability strategy uses metrics, logs, and traces to react to issues and manage and optimize for future demand.

Benefits of Observability Metrics:

Adding observability metrics to your observability plan gives you several concrete benefits:

• Real-time Monitoring: Metrics show how different system parts work in real-time. This instant feedback is key to running at optimal levels.
• Trending and Predictive: By looking at metrics over time, you can see trends and patterns that will tell you what the system will do in the future. Use this to fix problems before they hit the system.
• Resource Utilization: Metrics show how resources are being used, which helps you optimize them. This improves performance and cost management by preventing resource use or waste.
• Faster Incident Response: With metrics data, teams can quickly identify and respond to incidents, reducing the risk and impact of system failures.
• Better Customer Experience: By monitoring metrics like response time and system availability,, you can keep the user experience consistent and responsive, increasing overall customer happiness.

In short, observability metrics give you a base for a reliable, efficient, and customer-focused technology stack. They are the numbers you need to measure and improve the health of your IT systems. Implementing good metrics is part of the full observability of operational continuity, strategic excellence, and innovation.

Here are Top 10 Observability tools in 2024 to keep an eye out for!

The Three Pillars of Observability

Logs, metrics, and traces are the foundation of any observable system. These three pillars provide different views of system behavior and performance and, when used together, give you complete visibility. Understanding how they work together is key to a good observability strategy. Each pillar provides different data, and when used together, you can see the whole system.

Logs

What are Logs?

Logs are the most detailed observability data, capturing individual events within your system. They can be plaintext, structured, or binary, each for different use cases:

• Plaintext logs are simple and human-readable.
• Structured logs are formatted, making them easier to parse and automate analysis.
• Binary logs are more efficient but require special tools to interpret.

Roles of Logs

Logs have several key roles in system monitoring and management. They are essential for:

• Real-time monitoring: Immediate visibility into system events.
• Troubleshooting: Detailed information to diagnose issues.
• Compliance: Tracking changes and access to meet regulatory requirements.
• Business analytics: Actionable insights from system operations.

Log Challenges

Despite their importance, logs are a challenge. The volume of log data is overwhelming, leading to high storage costs and performance issues. Processing and analyzing this data requires robust solutions:

• Big data: Handling large amounts of log data is resource-hungry.
• Performance: High logging can impact system performance.
• Cost: Storing and managing lots of log data is expensive.

Treating event logging as a stream processing problem can help with some of these challenges, with tools like Kafka and Humio used for log management and analysis.

Metrics

Defining Metrics

Metrics are time series data points. They have evolved to have labels that add dimension and context. For example, CPU usage metrics can be labeled by server, application, or region so you can drill down further. This has made observability metrics a robust real-time monitoring and trend analysis tool.

Benefits of Metrics

Metrics are helpful for:

• Dashboards: Creating visualizations that give you an at-a-glance view of system health so you can quickly check-in.
• Alerts: Driving real-time notification systems to tell you when something is going wrong.
• Mathematical transformations: You can calculate averages or perform anomaly detection to delve deeper into system behavior and performance trends.

Drawbacks of Metrics

But metrics aren’t without their limitations:

• High cardinality: Where there are many unique label combinations it can slow down performance and make data analysis harder.
• Summarised view: Metrics give you a summarised view of system performance which may not have enough detail for deep-dive diagnostics.

So they’re not great for pinpointing specific issues without additional context from logs or traces.

Traces

Exploring Traces

Traces follow the requests as they flow through a system, capturing related events. This level of detail is key to understanding how different parts of your system interact and where the bottlenecks are. Tracing shows you the journey of a request from start to finish and where things go wrong along the way.

Benefits of Traces

• Optimized the request flow to meet service levels.
• Easier diagnoses and fixing performance issues = more efficient development and operations.

Tracing challenges

Tracing can be hard and resource-heavy. It often requires:

• Manual code changes: Instrumenting the system.
• Backend coverage limitations: Traces don’t cover all backend services.

But service meshes are emerging that are solving these challenges by making tracing easier and more comprehensive.

Integration of Metrics, Logs, and Traces

How Metrics, Logs, and Traces Work Together

• The combination of metrics, logs, and traces creates an environment for advanced monitoring and problem-solving across IT environments. Each of these three pillars provides unique information, but together they give you a full view of systems and applications.
• Observability Metrics are numerical data that measure the operations in a system, like response times, resource usage, and error rates. Logs are detailed records of what happens in the system, providing context and details about operations and events. Traces allow you to follow the journey of a specific request or transaction across different components and services.
• When these pieces are connected, IT professionals can cross-reference information quickly.
• For example, a spike in a metric can lead a developer to look at the logs at the exact time of the spike to see what was happening on the system. If the logs show an error or an unusual event, traces can be used to follow the path of the affected request to see which services or components were involved and how they interacted.
• This cohesive use of data not only speeds up the troubleshooting process but also gives you a better understanding of system behavior in real-world operations.

Alright, now that we've examined the fundamentals, let's dive into how to actually make these components gel together seamlessly.

Try OpenObserve and get real-time insights into your system's performance, unifying metrics, logs, and traces for quick and efficient issue resolution. Sign up!

Achieving Complete Observability with Integration

Complete observability means being able to see what’s happening inside your systems at any given moment and why it’s happening. Integrating metrics, logs, and traces gives you this level of observability. This integration lets you proactively manage your systems and prevent issues before they hit users.

A practical way to integrate is to correlate these different types of data:

• Create timestamps that synchronize records across metrics, logs, and traces.
• Use consistent tagging and naming conventions across systems and tools to make correlation and searchability easier.
• Implement smart alerting systems that can analyze patterns across metrics, logs, and traces to send early warnings about potential issues.

By making metrics, logs, and traces talk to each other, teams can go from noticing a problem, defined by an alert from a metric to diagnosing the issue with logs, to understanding the impact with traces. This proactive approach to observability turns operations from reactive problem-solving to data-driven management.

Tools for Monitoring

Overview of Monitoring Tools

• In the world of software and system monitoring, there are many tools that handle metrics, logs, and traces, each with its own features and capabilities. Some tools focus on one type of data, others on multiple types of data to give a unified view of system health.
• Observability Metrics tools like OpenObservability and Prometheus focus on numerical data and provide visualizations like graphs and dashboards. For logs, tools like ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) and Splunk are popular for their data ingestion and search capabilities. For tracing, solutions like Jaeger and Zipkin are used for tracking transactions across distributed systems.
• Integrated tools like Datadog, New Relic, and Dynatrace provide a more holistic view by supporting metrics, logs, and traces in one platform. These tools not only reduce the context switch for developers but also simplify the infrastructure needed to support monitoring and observability.

Click on the link to learn more about the top infrastructure and IT monitoring tools for 2024

Best Practices for Data Analysis

Data analysis is not just about monitoring—it’s about extracting insights from the data to optimize system performance and reliability. Here are some best practices for analyzing monitoring data:

• Set Clear Objectives: Start with clear goals. Are you troubleshooting, optimizing, assessing trends, or all of these? Clear objectives help you tailor your analysis to be more focused and effective.
• Use Automated Tools: Use automated tools for data collection and analysis to ensure high accuracy and efficiency. Automated tools can also help you identify patterns or anomalies that you might miss manually.
• Continuous Monitoring: Instead of periodic checks, do continuous monitoring to get real-time insights. This helps you detect and mitigate issues before they escalate.
• Contextual Dashboards: Create dashboards that don’t just show data but provide context. Include information about what normal performance looks like, historical trends, and correlations between different datasets.
• Educational Training: Regular training sessions for teams on the latest tools and practices so everyone can make the most of the monitoring systems in place. Knowledge sharing across the team improves issue resolution and system maintenance.

How can Observability Metrics Help You Make Better Business Decisions?

By following these practices, teams can ensure they are not just collecting data but using it to make informed decisions to improve system health and efficiency. Through strategic integration of metrics, logs, and traces and using the right tools, observability, and operational excellence become a reality.

To get the most out of metrics, you need to adopt best practices that enable analysis and action. Here are some to consider:

1. Full Coverage: Monitor everything in your system, not just a few things. This gives you a complete picture of system health and performance.
2. Real-time Monitoring and Alerts: Monitor in real-time with alerts when metrics go above thresholds. This allows you to act fast to mitigate issues before they get out of hand.
3. Contextual Analysis: Always analyze metrics in the context of recent changes, incidents, or trends. This helps you diagnose problems and understand the business impact.
4. Collaborative Review: Observability should be a team sport between engineering and business teams. Regular review of observability data can create a shared understanding of how technical performance affects business outcomes.
5. Use AI and Machine Learning: Use tools with AI and machine learning for predictive analytics. These can give you early warning of issues and optimization opportunities.

By implementing these best practices, teams can respond to issues more efficiently, anticipate and prevent potential problems, and ultimately drive better business results.

Conclusion

In short, logs, metrics, and traces are the three legs of observability, each giving you different and valuable views of your system. By understanding logs, traces, and observability metrics and using them, you can monitor, diagnose and improve your systems. Using their strengths and having them work together will give you more reliable, efficient, and observable software.

Try OpenObserve to integrate metrics, logs, and traces into one powerful platform, boosting your operational efficiency and enabling smarter, faster decision-making.