Cloud Native Infrastructure with Azure

Chapter 6. Observability: Following the Breadcrumbs

The rapid evolution of cloud native systems has introduced complexities around infrastructure provisioning, infrastructure deployment, and software management. Applications are being architected to be more resilient, and this requires a deeper understanding of the underlying infrastructure of the cloud environment, including failure modes and bottlenecks. Having visibility into the application stack becomes even more critical due to the multitude of new moving parts and design changes in today’s applications.

In this chapter, we will introduce the concept of observability and explain why it’s necessary in today’s cloud native world. You will learn about the three pillars of observability—logs, metrics, and traces—and gain insights on how they work together to create observable systems. We will also look at various well-known cloud native tools that can be used to create an observable system, and demonstrate how observability is a superset of monitoring. Finally, we will show how you can leverage Azure as a cloud platform to gain observability in your applications, underlying infrastructure, and networking stack.

Introduction to Observability

The first thing to understand about observability is the word itself. The term observability originated in the world of control theory in mathematics, which primarily deals with creating a way to control dynamic systems using a controller with the help of feedback from the system itself. ...