Observability is a comprehensive set of capabilities around logging, analytics, monitoring, troubleshooting, and measurement of a system. Here the term system is broadly used to indicate platform, runtimes, and applications. Observability plays a consequential role in providing the real-time pulse of a system. Lacking observability in a system would be similar to flying an aircraft without a fuel indicator.
Most organizations today have a governance strategy depending on their industry. Policies such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), or other acts influence a company’s governance strategy. However, these types of policies are often abstract and only provide mandates on “what” but not on “how” to govern an IT infrastructure and services. Organizations have recognized the need to enforce additional governance to derive uniformity, standards, best practices, and common operating procedures across teams.
With the advent of microservices, the functionalities that used to be bundled together in a single web/mule application are now running on different containers across VMs and at times across datacenters. This presents a huge challenge to trace transactions as they traverse across the container/VM boundaries.
Containers are becoming the de-facto hosting platform from microservices to databases and everything in-between. Kubernetes has emerged as the primary container orchestration platform, and MuleSoft offers Anypoint RTF, a Kubernetes-based container orchestration platform to run APIs and applications at scale, providing elasticity.
