My previous post about Infrastructure as Code concludes the exploration of Data Center and Cloud solutions and the methodologies that are related to automation and optimization of IT processes.
I've been working in this area for 15 years, after spending the previous 15 in software development.
It's been an amazing adventure and I really enjoied learning new things, exploring and challenging some limits - and sharing the experience with you.
Now I start focusing on a new adventure... possibly for the next 15 years 😜
I assumed a new professional role, that is the technical lead for Full Stack Observability, EMEA sales, at Cisco Appdynamics. From now on, I will tell you stories about my experience with the ultimate evolution of monitoring: it's all about collecting telemetry from every single component of your business architecture, including digital services (= distributed software applications), computing infrastructure, network, cloud resources, IoT, etc.
It's not just putting all those data together, but correlating them to create an insight. Transforming raw data into information about the health state of your processes, matching business KPI with the state of the infrastructure that supports the services.
To visualize that information and to navigate it, you can subscribe to (or create your own) different domain models, that are views of the world built specifically for each stakeholder: from lines of business to applications managers, from SRE to network operations and security teams...
A domain model is made of entities and their relationships, where entities represent what is relevant in your (business or technical) domain. They might be the usual entities in a APM domain (applications, services, business transactions...) or infrastructure entities (servers, VM, clusters, K8s nodes, etc.).
You can also model entities in a business domain (e.g. trains, stations, passengers, tickets, etc.).
Unlike Application Performance Monitoring (APM), where solutions like Appdynamics and its competitors excel in drilling down in the application architecture and its topology, with Full Stack Observability you really have full control end-to-end and have a context shared among all the teams that collaborate at building, running and operating the business ecosystem.
New standards like OpenTelemetry make it easy to convey Metrics, Events, Logs and Traces (MELT) to a unique platform from every single part of the system, including eventually robots in manufacturing, GPS tracing from your supply chain, etc.
All these data will be filtered according to the domain model and those that are relevant will feed the databases containing information about the domain entities and their relationships, that are used to populate the dashboard.
Those data will be matched with any other source of information that is relevant in your business domain (CRM, sales, weather forecast, logistics...) so that you can analyse and forecast the health of the business and relate it to the technologies and the processes behind. You can immediately remediate any problem because you detect the root cause easily, and even be proactive in preventing problems before they occur (or before they are perceived by end users). At the same time, you are able to spot opportunities for optimising the preformances and the cost efficiency of the system.
To see what is the official messaging from Cisco about the Full Stack Observability, check this page describing the FSO Platform.
Stay tuned, interesting news are coming...
