How to Take Infrastructure Monitoring to the Next Level

Observability is about seeing how problems in one part of your stack affect another part. So you can move from seeing that something went wrong to seeing why the issue occured in the first place. 

When you understand why problems occur, you can fix them much more quickly and prevent them from happening again. 

The context you gain from true observability also helps you connect how infrastructure health and performance impacts the experience customers have—giving you more clarity about the business outcomes of software and system health.

Speed is still your greatest asset in monitoring and maintaining your infrastructure. True observability gives you speed where you need it so you can put your focus where you want it. 

The point is to more rapidly deploy more resilient software, quickly detect problems, reduce MTTR, and build team confidence so that when you deploy new code, you know exactly how that code will perform in production.

But it’s also about having a healthy team. By working proactively to prevent future incidents, you gain more control over schedules and suffer from fewer unscheduled changes and late nights. That all makes for a happier team.

• It needs to be open
  Viewing all telemetry data in one place—regardless of whether it’s instrumented via agents or third-party sources—eliminates blindspots.
• It needs to connect the silos
  Just dumping data into one place isn’t enough. Understanding what’s happening across your software and systems and quickly deriving meaning helps you pinpoint issues faster and make smarter decisions.
• It needs to be programmable
  It isn’t a platform if you can’t build on it. But it’s more than that; programmable means building your own unique visualizations and tailored applications that matter to your business. 

Modernizing your infrastructure is important if you want to maintain a competitive advantage with your software. But it means you end up using different tools to monitor hosts, the network, storage devices, logs, etc.

This prevents consolidated end-to-end visibility, and results in:

• Inconsistent and incomprehensive telemetry
• Low data resolution, meaning spikes go undetected and issues can only be dealt with too late
• Lack of visibility into the off-the-shelf applications, the SaaS applications they’re responsible for, and even custom applications without an APM solution
• Problems affecting users before you notice them
• Lack of correlation between the health and performance of the different infrastructure and application components
• No visibility into unexpected or incorrect configuration changes that lead to performance issues

To make matters worse, many traditional monitoring tools run on-prem, which means they require additional resources and skills to be managed appropriately.

As a result, identifying and troubleshooting problems is slow and cumbersome, which means they take longer to resolve. And a lack of detailed data means root cause can’t be identified, so issues recur, which puts a strain on your team.

This ends up having a big impact on the customer experience.

Imagine you’re managing the infrastructure for a company that relies on a massive inflow of data from Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The data is crucial to the company’s success and the customer experience. 

Added to that is rapid growth through acquisition. Not only does acquisition mean your system is handling more data flowing through it, but it’s spread out across a complex cloud architecture.

You get an alert that an application has slowed. And that’s all. An alert. 

But is it a code error in the application that’s running inefficiently? Maybe it’s a problem with the data flowing in, in which case, are you going to need to check each device individually? Could it be an infrastructure resource problem that needs to be addressed to prevent serious problems down the line?

This example is based on a real problem faced by a company that was scaling quickly. Read the case study summary below.

Your business, software, and infrastructure systems are not, and never will be, exactly like anyone else’s. Each one is critical to delivering specific goals for your organization. Not only that, the deployment of that software and utilization of your infrastructure is unique to your ops team.

Modern microservices architectures provide abstractions that blur the line between infrastructure and applications. 

This simplifies deployment but adds complexity for monitoring. Your tools need to provide unified, end-to-end visibility across your entire estate, and through your full stack. 

Time spent switching between different tools that monitor different parts of your stack is time wasted. It creates data silos that increase toil and the risk of blind spots. Interpreting performance metrics from multiple tools can also lead to human error. Having those metrics in one place reduces the chance of error so you can act decisively and quickly.

Tool consolidation puts all your infrastructure and application performance, customer experience, and log data in one place, so you can detect, diagnose, and resolve problems faster.

Imagine you’re 90% of the way through diagnosing an app problem but the final part is in a log somewhere and you need to switch tools to find and fix it.You’re losing precious seconds you don’t have each time you need to switch contexts.

Or consider that the health of the services you rely on is just as important as the health of your own system. Each service has its own status page, but checking those requires visiting 14 different pages. Most of those pages publish their APIs, so why shouldn’t you have a consolidated, single view of their status?

When you run a combination of legacy and DIY monitoring tools, you lose the overall view of your system’s health. And this problem is amplified by teams working in silos with siloed data. This puts a strain on IT and makes resource allocation difficult.

Seeing your system through an integrated, single screen removes blind spots and puts into view the full map, from infrastructure health to customer experience. Improved MTTR means less downtime, and that means less lost revenue and improved profitability. And, of course, the consolidated view and single tool means better allocation of resources.

Infrastructure needs to scale. And as it does, you need monitoring tools that can scale, too.

But traditional, self-hosted monitoring tools take time to scale, maintain, and upgrade as your surface area expands. 

A modern infrastructure monitoring solution, delivered as a SaaS offering, should feel invisible. It should make it easier to see the reality of your environment as it becomes more complex, instead of making it harder.

In addition, a modern approach to observability needs to incorporate AIOps and intelligence capabilities to enable faster incident response.

This gives you the ability to proactively detect anomalies and automatically correlate incident events to reduce alert noise. Metadata and enrichment help you diagnose incidents and get to root cause faster. So you can take action to remediate more quickly.

This means you get notified about problems before the customer notices and you can diagnose them more efficiently. Smarter alerting ensures the teams best equipped to respond are notified first.

The result is a focus on better customer experiences, more essential tasks, and proactively preventing incidents. Your team is free to focus on their real job: shipping new products, software, and features more quickly to the market.

A modern approach to infrastructure monitoring lets you spend less time maintaining your monitoring and more time focusing on scaling and optimizing your infrastructure.

Observability is about making the job of managing IT infrastructure easier at the exact same time that it’s getting more and more complex. Being able to see where a problem is, why it’s happening, what to do about it, and how it’s affecting the rest of your infrastructure is the difference between traditional monitoring and true observability. 

It’s also the difference between seconds and minutes, and between scaling for tomorrow’s opportunities and firefighting today’s problems.

As important as observability is to effective infrastructure management, it’s also important to remember what all of this is really about. Observability isn’t an end in and of itself.

The point is to empower you and your infrastructure team to more rapidly understand what systems components need to adapt and how. In some cases, that might be to prevent downtime. In others it might be to provision an appropriate amount of resources. In others still it might be to accommodate a new innovation.

Because at the end of the day, perhaps the only thing that is certain about modern infrastructure management is that there will be changes. And those changes will have a ripple effect across an increasingly complex surface area.

The teams that have the most positive impact on their businesses will be the ones that can navigate all this change and adapt in the ways the business needs them to.

The ones that know precisely what they’re working with.

New Relic is an open, connected, and programmable platform that gives you end-to-end, contextual observability across your entire tech stack. It gives you a consolidated view of all your data, from your customers’ browser and mobile device experiences to your applications and infrastructure, wherever it runs. This reduces blindspots, provides context, and gives you insights across artificial organizational boundaries—so you can quickly find and fix problems.

Find out how we can help you maintain availability and uptime.