What Is Full Stack Observability?
Full stack observability is the concept of observing the real-time status of each technology stack component distributed in an IT environment. Simply put, it means holistically viewing your cloud-hosted applications, services, infrastructure, on-premise servers, Kubernetes infrastructure, and many more.
Full stack observability tools use telemetry data, such as metrics, logs, and traces (also known as the three pillars of observability) from the entire IT environment of an organization to gain in-depth insights into the performance, health, and behavior of their applications and infrastructure. At the same time, they help organizations to understand the connection and dependencies between their IT components.
While full stack observability might look like just another word for technology stack monitoring, there is a fundamental difference between observability and monitoring. Monitoring is looking at signals and generating reports and alerts, whereas observability is looking at signals and deducing the status of technology components. If monitoring is not effective, you won’t be able to achieve full stack observability.
Why Is Full Stack Observability Important?
Full stack observability provides a holistic view of the active systems to your teams and lets them improve the performance and health of the system in time. More specifically, here’s what it helps you achieve:
Get a Deeper Understanding and Visibility into Your Entire IT Environment
Having complete end-to-end visibility across the IT environments or domains enables organizations to get deeper actionable insights into their applications and understand their performance under certain conditions. With such insights, organizations can easily isolate high-priority issues and resolve them faster to provide a consistent user experience with minimum impact. When paired with analytics, they can improve the existing systems and apply the latest innovative solutions swiftly, which helps them gain a competitive advantage over competitors.
Eliminate Monitoring Tool Sprawl
Many organizations that have moved to cloud environments, often end up using different monitoring solutions for infrastructure, applications, and service, causing what is known as “monitoring tool sprawl”. This increases the number of monitoring tools that you will need to manage. It also makes monitoring a complex task as it delays resolution, which increases the associated costs. The result is often confusion and conflicts around the solution path that resolves issues. Traditional monitoring tools were not built for observability, they lack the end-to-end view of the entire environment. A good observability tool can provide insights into all the components of your infrastructure, being able to take over the tasks of the many individual solutions you might have now.
Break Silos Among Teams
By becoming the single source of truth, full stack observability tools help to break down operational silos by providing. All teams get to have the same overview of the system., which can be effective in eliminating confusion. They can work collaboratively to resolve issues faster and keep the applications running without damaging the user experience.
Optimize Resources and Cost
Your applications can have varying traffic loads at different times depending on the seasons. When you have a detailed picture of how your applications, storage, and network resources and their dependencies are performing, it is easy to optimize the resources according to the demand fluctuations. Full-stack observability enables organizations to forecast the resource capacity and scale up or down proactively to reduce resource costs and downtimes.
Enhance Domain Knowledge and Support Business Decisions
Lack of full visibility of the entire IT environment can create gaps in knowledge as IT and business teams often only know specific areas of their domain. Observability provides a shared context that everyone can use as reference for their decisions. It enables stakeholders to work together to prioritize what matters to the business and explore new avenues that can generate revenue in the long term.
Improve Troubleshooting
Full stack observability platforms enable DevOps teams to correlate logs, metrics and traces from every component of their IT environment for faster troubleshooting. Engineers can use this information to explore and identify system issues quickly and troubleshoot them before they become a problem for your customers. It also minimizes the backlog of issues surrounding the development and production environments.
Improve the Application Security
With today’s modern and complex technology stacks, applications and infrastructure can become vulnerable to cyber threats more than ever before. Observability helps DevSecOps and SecOps teams to easily spot potential security issues and assess their impact on each component. They enable teams to eliminate such issues, before they become serious.
Enhance Customer Experience
Issues such as unoptimized page load time or increased latency can have a negative impact on your customers’ experience, the focus of digital experience monitoring (DEM). Full stack observability allows teams to quickly identify and mitigate such issues and ensure the network is not disrupted. Which leads to better business outcomes and a steady flow of revenues.
Sematext as a Full Stack Observability Solution
Sematext Cloud is a full-stack observability tool that allows you to get a unified view of your Infrastructure, Logs, Real User Monitoring, and Synthetic Monitoring. With automatic service discovery, it enables you to auto-detect and auto-configure services in your infrastructure, removing all the hassle of manual configuration and focusing on providing meaningful metrics and events that will reveal the actual status of each component of your infrastructure. It’s just a matter of a few clicks, everything else is already prepared for you.
Sematext Cloud is the single source of truth when it comes to full-stack observability as it supports more than 100 integrations for Monitoring and Logging.
Integrations at Sematext are full featured bundles with out-of-the-box pre-configured dashboards for metrics, logs, fine tuned alerts, and a wide selection of notifications. Each of them can be further customized to match the needs of your specific use case. Some examples include Cloud and on-host integrations like AWS Monitoring, Kubernetes Monitoring and Docker Monitoring. If something’s wrong with your server’s cache, JVM threads or HTTP requests, Sematext has you covered. But also other Integrations like Database, Web and Proxy Monitoring like MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache Tomcat, Nginx, HAProxy and others.
It doesn’t matter how complex your infrastructure is or whether you want to monitor a single server or hundreds of Kubernetes clusters with thousands of containers; the same unified experience and ease of use will be presented for each case. Further, all these integrations can be interconnected so that you can correlate logs and metrics for a single screen, which enables proper analysis and fast troubleshooting.
Another key component is anomaly detection which notifies you of potential problems and issues with your environment without any false alerts. It also removes the need to update the alert thresholds to match the new state of your infrastructure.
With Sematext Experience, you have the ability to add real-time user monitoring to your monitoring stack in order to see website performance as it is experienced by users. It provides insight about perceived performance metrics such as Apdex, Time to First Byte, Largest Contentful Paint and much more.
You can use Synthetics to monitor the availability of your websites and HTTP APIs and to create alerts for errors, high response times, SSL certificate expiry, and other anomalies.
Sematext Cloud provides reactive and predictive monitoring as well as easy analysis in order to deliver a superior experience to your users. Instead of speculating and validating assumptions, Sematext provides solutions that will find out the problems for you.
Watch the video below to learn about how Sematext Cloud can help and or sign up for the 14-day free trial and get full-stack visibility of your environment!
Frequently Asked Questions
How does full-stack observability differ from traditional monitoring?
Traditional monitoring often focuses on specific components, such as server metrics or application logs. Full-stack observability goes beyond individual components and emphasizes the correlation of data across the entire stack to provide a more comprehensive understanding of system behavior.
What are the benefits of full-stack observability?
Full-stack observability provides a more holistic view of system behavior, enabling faster detection and resolution of issues. It enhances troubleshooting capabilities, improves system reliability, and contributes to better overall user experiences.
What challenges might organizations face when implementing full-stack observability?
Challenges may include the complexity of integrating multiple observability tools, ensuring consistent instrumentation across diverse technologies, managing and analyzing large volumes of data, and addressing privacy and compliance considerations.
