Linkerd: Up and Running

Chapter 10. Observing Your Platform with Linkerd

One of the challenges of working with microservices applications is monitoring them. When dealing with multiple development teams, even in a single language, understanding which workloads are communicating and surfacing useful metrics from those communications can be a huge challenge. Every developer, language, and framework will prioritize different details, and organizations need a single way to view all those different services.

Observability refers to this ability to understand a system by looking at it from the outside. An application can be more or less observable, so when we talk about observability in Linkerd we’re referring to how it impacts the observability of your applications. In this chapter, we’ll look at how Linkerd increases observability by providing all your apps with standard metrics, allowing you to see the relationships between your microservices, and allowing you to intercept and analyze interapp communications.

Why Do We Need This?

As with application security, microservices present new challenges for platform engineers. The ability to dynamically scale components, create and update services on demand, and dynamically provision infrastructure increases the difficulty of understanding the health of our applications. As your organization builds out your platform for application developers, it’s important that you make it easy for teams to do the right thing.

How Does Linkerd Help?

Linkerd helps make observability ...