Back in 2019, I published an article on “Digital Experience Monitoring with Continuous Performance Mandatory” for Digital Business in CIO Review Magazine. Recently (Aug,22), I was reading an interview with Mehdi Daoudi, CEO, and co-founder of Catchpoint. In his interview, he was clearly saying that digital experience observability is now a must have, Not a nice-to-have for digital business since pandemic.
I also talked about observability in 2021 in my EuroSTAR Huddle blog article, “The Evolvement of Performance Monitoring Tools”). In short, there is no doubt that organisations are now moving towards digital experience observability from digital experience monitoring for successful digital business. In this blog article, I will talk about why digital experience observability is mandatory for enduring in the digital business.
Digital Experience Monitoring
Digital experience monitoring allows to detect and understand end to end digital system state using a known predefined set of metrics and logs. There is no doubt that digital experience monitoring is very critical for analysing long-term trends, dashboard, and alerting for digital system. However, production failures are not straightforward and very hard to predict in today’s highly complex distributed digital applications.
Digital experience monitoring always notifies when something is wrong, however while notification is important, it is more vital to understand why it was wrong. This enables organisations to think about observability and moving towards digital experience observability.
Digital experience monitoring can be thought as a subset of digital experience observability and Digital experience monitoring is one of the key actions for digital experience observability.
Digital Experience Observability
Digital experience observability measures a digital system internal state from all its external outputs. Digital experience observability uses compositions to provide insights that assist in digital experience monitoring.
Digital experience observability assists to gain visibility into everything, literally everything, from distributed services to content delivery networks to DNS services to APIs to other third-party cloud-based services as example. This visibility also includes telemetry where traditional agent based APM or systems monitoring has no reach.
Digital experience observability assists to stay alert on any kind of risks or incidents throughout the SDLC- software development lifecycle. It provides full visibility to the entire CI/CD pipeline along with complete infrastructure. Digital experience observability not only shares quick feedback on the health of environment at any time but also speedily identify the potential root cause of the issue even in high complex distributed systems. Metrics, logs, and traces are known as golden triangle of observability. They will always assist in finding the potential reason in ever-changing IT business.
Though both digital experience observability and digital experience monitoring relies on metrics, logs, and traces, however digital experience observability is more proactive. For successful digital business, proactive prevention is mandatory.
Digital experience monitoring analyses health checks, alerts, dashboards, traces, logs, and metrics whereas Digital experience observability analyses distributed traces, automated service discovery, dynamics dependency graph, contextualised logs, granular metrics without sampling, application profiling, end-user monitoring, smart alerts, root cause analysis etc.
Conclusion
Today’s high complex distributed production system can fail for several reasons at any time. There will be always a chance to something might fail despite all the possibilities to avoid it. Digital experience observability will play a major role to support on those cases by offering complete view of the end-to-end digital delivery chain. In a nutshell, digital experience observability ensures enhanced end-user experience and mandatory for enduring in the digital business.
Reference
- https://software-testing.ciotechoutlook.com/cxoinsight/digital-experience-monitoring-with-continuous-performance-mandatory-for-digital-business-nid-4906-cid-22.html (My Blog)
- https://huddle.eurostarsoftwaretesting.com/evolvement-of-performance-monitoring-tools/
- https://www.techcompanynews.com/digital-experience-observability-is-a-must-have-not-a-nice-to-have/?utm_source=bambu&utm_medium=social&blaid=3426782
- https://thenewstack.io/monitoring-vs-observability-whats-the-difference/
- https://devops.com/metrics-logs-and-traces-the-golden-triangle-of-observability-in-monitoring/
