Are you watching your organization’s efforts to enter or expand into a cloud-native environment and feel a little overwhelmed by the overwhelming amount of information surrounding cloud-native visibility? When you’re moving so quickly with agile practices in your DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering teams, it’s no wonder this can seem a little confusing.
Unfortunately, the choices made have a major impact on your business, your budgets, and the ultimate success of your cloud initiatives, as rash decisions up front lead to major headaches down the road.
In a previous article, we looked at the pain we face when being led down proprietary paths for our cloud-native monitoring solutions. In this final article in my series, I’ll address the secret mess that often develops in our cloud-native visibility tools landscape. By sharing common pitfalls in this series, we hope we can learn from them.
It will always be a challenge to make the right decisions when solving the puzzle of a cloud-native monitoring stack for our organization. There are so many choices. From open to proprietary, from pillars to phases, from a cost perspective and much more that we have to consider.
Often this leads to a natural cloudscape full of observational tools, giving us the feeling that the day is creeping up on us where we have truly lost control of our own destiny.
How many are needed?
This story speaks for itself when we look at some of the recently published research on observational tools. This report, published by analytics firm ESG (a division of TechTarget), surveyed 357 IT, DevOps, and application development professionals responsible for infrastructure in their organizations. All had some form of observational practice and discovered interesting insights into how organizations are overwhelmed by their choice of tools.
It goes without saying that native cloud environments are producing data at a scale that many organizations struggle to handle, and this report shows that 71% of them feel their data visibility is growing at an alarming rate.
This leads to concerns about challenges such as the lack of visibility into their landscape, which is becoming more and more fragmented, which causes security problems. This concern has sparked an incredible response where 44% say they are buying more monitoring tools and 65% are turning to third-party tools in hopes of taking back control of their visibility. What’s really interesting is that 66% of these organizations use more than 10 – yes, you read that right – different monitoring tools.
Where does this lead us in our quest to regain control of our viewability data?
This has left on-call engineers having to dig through different reporting tools, disjointed dashboard experiences, and end up with more stress than is healthy for a job that shouldn’t be that difficult. We want to address our native cloud experiences by considering their stages, rather than adding a new tool for every new viewability data issue we encounter.
The best way to approach this problem and reduce hidden proliferation is to make sure we give our on-call engineers the right amount of information, presented in the right way they need it, and give them the opportunity to solve the visibility issues that arise from time to time in our natural environment. landscape. Choosing tools that don’t just solve the problem at hand, but are part of an overall plan to address our data and infrastructure needs and help our on-call engineers be successful in their endeavors.
The road to cloud native success has many pitfalls, and understanding how to avoid the pillars and focusing instead on solutions for the visibility stages will save a lot of wasted time and energy.
More ideas?
This concludes my series on the pitfalls of cloud-native visibility, but that certainly doesn’t mean there aren’t more to discuss. If you feel I’ve missed something important, please comment or contact me as I’ll be happy to chat. There’s a good chance I’ll ask you to co-author another article in this series if you bring an idea, because sharing the pitfalls is how others can avoid havoc in their cloud-native visibility efforts.
Below are links to other articles in this series of Cloud Native Visibility Pitfalls:
- Introduction
- Controlling costs
- With a focus on The Pillars
- Cardinality underestimation
- Ignoring the existing landscape
- Protocol jungle
- Sneaky Sprawling Mess (this article)