With increasing demands for innovation and spiraling requirements for IT to deliver more services in an efficient, secure and insightful manner, organizations have turned to observability solutions to support operational acceleration.
No longer is it sufficient for organizations to use dashboards to monitor system performance, or to view operational performance solely through point tools such as application performance monitoring or log management. This is particularly true in an era of skyrocketing data volumes and the de facto standardization of multi-cloud architectures to support business- and mission-critical workloads.
Research from TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group highlights this trend. Nearly all large enterprises (87%) and almost half of midmarket organizations (47%) it surveyed already have observability solutions and processes in place—and the remainder indicated they have observability plans underway.1
Driving forces for observability
The many key drivers for observability solutions—making business processes more efficient, increasing employee productivity, delivering an enhanced customer experience and more—have coalesced to create a raft of use cases for cloud-based observability. These include network performance monitoring, application performance monitoring, security threat detection and response, and log management.
In particular, organizations now are looking for full-stack observability, which focuses on monitoring and understanding what’s happening throughout the full software stack, from the application layer to the infrastructure layer and everything in between. Enterprise Strategy Group’s research found that 43% of organizations already have full-stack observability in place, while another 41% are either developing proofs of concept or plan to implement full-stack observability within the next 12 months.
However, not all organizations have yet to take a comprehensive, coordinated approach to observability. Many organizations transitioned their way into some form of observability by addressing individual problems or needs with point products. In fact, observability tool sprawl all too often remains the rule rather than the exception. As such, many organizations have started searching for ways to synergistically design and deploy observability in concert with a cloud service provider.
What to look for in a cloud observability framework
Most cloud service providers incorporate some types of observability tools and technologies in their core cloud platform. These first-party services often include such capabilities as cloud logging and monitoring, error reporting, tracing, profiling of CPU usage and memory allocation, debugging and security.
The best cloud platforms build their observability functions around enabling technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, serverless infrastructure, low-code development platforms, performance monitoring and load balancing, performance analytics and extremely high levels of automation. At the same time, even premier cloud platforms such as Google Cloud leverage a strong, experienced and proven ecosystem of independent software vendors (ISVs) to extend their own services with third-party tools that make multi-cloud observability an end-to-end reality.
Google Cloud’s approach to observability
A key attribute of Google Cloud is that it is an environment where organizations can author and publish business-critical applications. Given the essential nature of those applications and the need to manage them properly, observability is a must-have. Google makes observability available both as a native service and through a lineup of proven partners.
At the heart of Google Cloud observability solutions is Google Cloud Operations Suite, a multi-tool platform for enterprise-wide visibility into monitoring, logging, performance management and more. Logging, monitoring, tracing and other observability functions are integrated into the suite to promote resilient, secure and high-performance observability, even at hyperscaler levels.
It also supports open source logging and monitoring solutions, as well as the ability to search, sort and query logs. Its advanced error reporting automatically analyzes logs for exceptions and uses AI to provide contextual aggregation for proper response and remediation.
A key aspect of Google Cloud’s observability strategy is its ISV ecosystem, developed over a number of years and designed to leverage the capabilities of world-class software partners with different observability tools. These include Dynatrace, which offers a fully automated, AI-powered observability solution for hybrid Google Cloud environments; DataDog, a monitoring and security platform for cloud applications; and Chronosphere, which delivers customizable observability for Google Cloud-based cloud-native organizations.
Conclusion and next steps
Google Cloud has developed a strategic approach to cloud observability, layering a strong ecosystem of ISV-developed and -delivered tools on top of the Google Cloud platform. The combination of Google Cloud’s native capabilities and those of its ISVs has allowed it to bring observability to a wider array of organizations across industries and geographies.
For more information about Google Cloud observability solutions, please visit here.
1 “Observability and Demystifying AIOps,” TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group, 2023
