What is observability?

Observability is the ability to continuously track how a system is functioning internally, based on a number of measurements, metrics, logs, and traces — often called telemetry. The concept recognizes that systems are complex and dynamic, and thus operating conditions fluctuate during runtime. 

Modern observability tools also incorporate some degree of automation to act on incoming information quickly, or make this process easier for monitoring teams. Plus, these tools help improve user experiences downstream by helping administrators fix issues. 

How does observability work? 

Good observability involves knowing the status of a system and its overall health while maintaining visibility over each critical infrastructure component. This applies to components across the tech stack (including hardware), yet many organizations have shifted their focus to software (or virtualized) components due to widespread adoption of cloud platforms. 

In any case, observability centers on tracking the following: 

• Performance – Including throughput, message delivery rates, bandwidth consumption, CPU and memory usage, and latency

• Security – Including client behavioral analysis, security layer responses (such as web application firewalls), and notable events

• Availability – Including general health checking, status UP or DOWN, notable outages, and overall uptime (typical expressed as a percentage)

• Issue remediation – Including responses to errors or incidents, and corrective actions that may be taken to resolve them

Additionally, here's how each observability mechanism works: 

• Logs contain detailed information on a noteworthy event for later parsing. This is a passive mechanism, as logs typically aren't read as they're generated (unless a critical issue demands it). 

• Metrics primarily provide numerical insights into how the system is running. Teams can identify a baseline expectation of performance based on past observations, then compare subsequent data against those goals.

• Traces record transactions between a client and a backend server, API, or other service. Traces often consider the flow of packets across a network and what that journey looks like. 

Observability on the whole is crucial for understanding the resilience of a system. When unpredictable conditions — such as traffic spikes or bottlenecks — present themselves, how will the system react? Will the system log those events automatically as you'd expect? If a component within that system such as a load balancer goes down, will administrators be informed in a timely manner? 

It's important to answer these questions while understanding ahead of time which metrics are most impactful to your infrastructure. Organizations grapple with these external factors regularly. However, teams can more proactively investigate how a system (and the monitoring tool itself) will respond to stressors through practices such as controlled chaos testing or penetration testing. This helps teams know what to expect under similar runtime conditions and more clearly interpret outputs compiled by their observability suite. 

Here's where an important distinction comes in. While an observability tool collects runtime data from numerous sources, the tool itself isn't generating that data. The intermediary infrastructure component — such as a load balancer or router — that receives and processes incoming traffic will. A virtual component installed within a running application instance, such as a sidecar, will often ingest this data before passing it to the centralized observability tool. 

So, whose responsibility is observability? IT teams (sometimes called "ITOps"), system administrators, and often DevSecOps engineers are tasked with overseeing system functionality. Not only are these teams training in incident response, but they have the ability to respond rapidly to alerts and extinguish any fires.

Observability vs. monitoring

Observability and monitoring are often used interchangeably, but this isn't fully accurate. Generally speaking, observability is the "thing" you strive for, while monitoring entails actively scrutinizing systemic information. Typically, this involves identifying specific metrics of importance and seeing how those metrics fluctuate while an application, API, or AI service is live. 

However, monitoring tends to focus more on expected outcomes and operational goals. Monitoring solutions take compiled data and present it in a digestible format — typically through dashboards or other UI elements. It's a process that helps guide business decisions and therefore promote better business practices. Meanwhile, observability is a measure of how transparent and visible a system is, based on the data it can gather on itself. This self-awareness moves infrastructure components away from being perceived as "magic boxes" and helps reveal those inner workings powering the system.

What are the benefits of observability?

A comprehensive observability solution offers the following perks to organizations: 

• Continual data collection enables teams to make improvements to their infrastructure, based on the relationship between metrics, logs, and traces. It also enables application performance monitoring while accelerating remediation efforts. 

• Infrastructure improvements lead to positive outcomes for applications, which in turn make them more reliable and enjoyable to use. This development effort can happen sooner during the software development lifecycle — not just reactively when problems arise. 

• Observability across clouds is essential for pursuing a cohesive multi-cloud deployment strategy, while bringing greater transparency to globally-distributed components. 

• Better infrastructure health leads boosts uptime, which can also positively impact revenue numbers while earning user trust. 

• Better infrastructure health and performance leads to better scalability for any supported applications or services.

Does HAProxy offer observability? 

Yes! HAProxy Enterprise collects over 150 security and performance metrics and offers robust logging across the system. Meanwhile, HAProxy Fusion Control Plane enables full-lifecycle management, observability, and automation of multi-cluster, multi-cloud, and multi-team HAProxy Enterprise deployments for your DevSecOps teams. With customizable dashboards and controls, HAProxy Fusion helps you better understand your application traffic and its impacts on backend performance. 

To learn more about observability within HAProxy, check out our Observability solution or our presentation, How To Take Control Of Your HAProxy Fleet: Simplicity, Flexibility, & Performance at Scale.