SRE Observability + Monitoring: A Guide to Differential Site Reliability Engineering

“Flexibility is the key to stability.”

– John Wooden

John Wooden was talking about basketball, but the legendary coach’s insights on flexibility apply just as well to the technology space. It takes flexibility and a variety of approaches to ensure the stability of your application architecture.

Modern applications use distributed and service-oriented architectures to resolve legacy software issues like scalability, security, maintenance and compliance. But these architectures don’t guarantee a reliable, resilient or high-performance application. This is why Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) matters.

When implementing SRE, two of the most essential processes are observability and monitoring. These complementary SRE capabilities work together to support application health and flexibility.

SRE Monitoring: Listen to Your System

Monitoring involves the use of SRE monitoring tools that aggregate, correlate and analyze data from the hardware and network they run on, to effectively observe, troubleshoot and debug applications. This includes creating dashboards, uncovering long-term trends and mapping exactly how an application functions using a predetermined set of metrics and logs – all with the goal of discovering and correcting errors.

In simpler terms, monitoring measures the health of apps by tracking specific “what happened when” metrics.

But SRE monitoring only addresses one facet of application health – and it’s not always sufficient to just diagnose isolated errors across complex distributed apps. By its nature, monitoring only dispenses data related to the behavior and performance of your system, highlighting system failures and suggesting fixes. This might sound impressive – and it is – but monitoring offers little to no end-to-end visibility of what’s happening across the bigger picture of your IT environment.

SRE observability, on the other hand, does. It gives DevOps and SRE teams end-to-end visibility, so that they’re able to monitor multi-layered IT architectures using metrics like latency, traffic, errors and saturation.

Let’s dig a little deeper.

SRE Observability: The Big Picture

When R. Kalman introduced SRE observability, he linked it with the study of control systems and described it as a practice that examines the internal state of a system based on its output. Given the assumption that distributed infrastructure components are spread across layers of abstraction, observability is perfectly suited for the needs of enterprises with complex and interconnected IT systems.

Observability is divided into 3 basic pillars.

Logs – Files of recorded events within an environment. Logs include contextual information that describes when an event has occurred. No matter how log data is stored, it’s aggregated and analyzed collectively by SRE observability tools.

Metrics – Observability uses metrics to map the performance of applications or infrastructure. Depending on user intent, metrics can be used to trace latency, traffic or errors.

Distributed tracing – By tracking parts of an application, distributed tracing records when a component processes a request received by the previous component before passing it to the next. Traces can identify which parts of an app trigger an error.

In a broader context, observability enables IT teams to not only gain deeper insights into the health of applications but also into how resources are utilized within the infrastructure – including ways that uptime and performance can be improved.

Observability Vs. Monitoring: The Key Differences

Monitoring predominantly measures defined metrics using dashboards specifically for this task. By contrast, observability is about consuming every facet of data collected from logs, metrics and tracing using SRE observability tools. In other words, monitoring is reactive while observability is proactive.

Monitoring employs predetermined data to diagnose system anomalies, but it can’t pinpoint underlying issues. With observability on the other hand, teams are able to comprehensively assess system health, uncover granular insights and troubleshoot underlying issues.

Where monitoring aims to identify what the problem in an application is, observability can get to the root cause of the issue and discover the how, what and why of the situation. It can determine the internal state of a system based on its external output to help IT teams accurately diagnose and correct the root cause of a performance problem without additional testing or coding.

While SRE monitoring and observability are both important, observability’s “big picture” view enables greater understanding and empowers IT teams to be more targeted and flexible in their approach to solving performance issues.

Level Up Your SRE with Material

This is just a brief intro to the complexities of SRE monitoring and observability. The full benefits of these approaches depend on your use case and intent.

If you’re facing performance bottlenecks, Material can help. We’ll provide a thorough assessment of your application, discover areas of impact and help you implement the right SRE solutions for your business. Reach out and let’s start the conversation.