Every SaaS application is built on top of layers of infrastructure, services, and code. All of this works together to deliver your business value to your customers.
While your goal is for your customers to only see a seamless user interface, your development and operations teams face a far more daunting reality. All of these interconnected components have the ability to misbehave, be exploited by a bad actor, or simply fail outright.
Observability is what makes this potential operational nightmare manageable. Without observability, you are unable to understand why your application has taken a sudden performance dip, or why an error spike occurs. You can’t tell whether a subtle anomaly is the first sign of an attack or simply a minor glitch.
Observability is the nervous system of a modern SaaS application. It collects data from the various pieces of your application and your infrastructure, combines them, and merges them, as shown in Figure 4-1. It interprets the observability data and translates it into recommended actions.
Figure 4-1. Basic observability interconnects the entire application fabric
Simple monitoring will tell you what went wrong after the fact. But observability will help you identify what’s happening right now in your system. It’ll help you identify why it’s happening and help make predictions ...
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