Observability for IT Infrastructure
IT infrastructure encompasses an organization's on-premise as well as the cloud infrastructure, including networks, applications, and supporting technology. This article will discuss how an IT Infrastructure can be made future-proof using an observability solution.
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IT Infrastructure- The backbone of modern business
A strong IT infrastructure is the backbone of modern organizations. It facilitates seamless operations across multiple departments, ensuring the smooth delivery of services to customers. It encompasses the hardware, software, networks, and facilities that support the entire computing need of an organization.
A well-maintained IT infrastructure improves operational efficiency, supports scalability, and fosters innovation. It serves as a base for introducing new technologies, securing confidential data, and adjusting to shifting business requirements.
How can an IT Infrastructure be made robust and future-proof?
Building a rock-solid IT setup starts with having a complete understanding of the entire infrastructure. A bird's-eye view of all IT operations and following industry-recommended best practices will help you streamline IT processes, amplify the business value of the services you deliver, and empower your IT team to continuously monitor and enhance the performance of your IT functions.
The ultimate ticket to achieving this is the ability to observe—that is, having end-to-end observability of your IT infrastructure, network, applications, operations, and everything related to them.
To understand observability better, consider this use case:
- A sudden surge in the number of I/O transactions has caused a spike in your CPU, and the memory has become overutilized. This goes unnoticed until it affects the performance of the application running on that server, which might be hosted in the cloud or on-premises. This creates a chain of reactions until it reaches the user in the form of poor performance—and then reaches your ears. Then, the usual procedure: identifying the issue and its root cause, troubleshooting it, and educating your users.
- Before the issue affected the entire IT operation, and before it reached the end user, if your IT teams had been alerted about the spike, they would have been able to balance the load by spawning the resources for better allocation or restarting the server. There are reliable and even automated ways to implement these remedial processes, and employing AI-powered solutions can help you avoid issues and achieve observability.
Observability for a big-picture view
Monitoring or tracking your resources deals with the known knowns and known unknowns. Observability, on the other hand, deals with the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns.
Known knowns
Known knowns are risks that you are acquainted with and comprehend. For instance, when creating an application, you are aware of the risk of bugs.
Known unknowns
Known unknowns are risks that you acknowledge but lack a complete understanding of. For instance, you may recognize the risk of changing market trends impacting your product sales, but the extent of its impact remains uncertain.
Unknown knowns
Unknown knowns are those aspects that you thought you comprehended but, in reality, you did not. For instance, assuming that a software update will improve system performance, but instead, it introduces bugs and slows down operations.
Unknown unknowns
Unknown unknowns are risks that elude your awareness altogether. For instance, a sudden breakthrough in technology, like quantum computing, could disrupt your industry. This category poses the greatest challenge, as you cannot anticipate or prepare for risks that you're unaware of until they manifest.
The ability to observe encompasses:
- Identifying the anomaly.
- Finding the root cause.
- Tracking down the impact and the effects.
- Notifying proactively.
- Planning the capacity for better resource allocation.
- Understanding the health trends and forecast.
- Automating remedial measures when there is a breach in the stable limits.
Thus, having robust observability reduces manual intervention and helps you stay focused on your business operations, knowing your entire IT setup is covered, including the known unknowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns.
Observability in action
Zylker is a successful organization whose website and applications run on an IIS server. Zylker has approximately 3,000 users daily and 100,000 users every month. Yet, its services have been slow for over two weeks. According to Google, when a mobile page load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, there's a 123% increase in bounce rate. So, this is a crucial issue.
However, this did not come to Zylker's attention until feedback and support tickets skyrocketed. They were clueless about the reason and wanted to analyze and troubleshoot the slowness.
Imagine if Zylker had a complete observability solution like Site24x7 backing up its IT Infrastructure and reducing this manual effort to zero. The solution would analyze what went wrong and drill down into the root cause of the issue.
Holistic monitoring and tracing to detect and resolve bottlenecks in distributed architectures
First, the solution will monitor the website end-to-end at regular intervals from different global locations to ensure availability and page load time. The response-time split-up will also help Zylker find out the component within the response time that's facing slowness.
Then, it will trace the applications on which the website is hosted. Comprehensive distributed tracing, and monitoring individual transactions across microservices and distributed architectures, will help pinpoint errors, slicing the mean time to detect (MTTD).
Next, it will track the session details, cache, queued, and failed requests to prevent overload and identify resource contention issues caused by the top-running processes while conducting a detailed analysis of the CLR data and thread data connected to .NET. Thus, if there is an issue, Zylker's admins will be able to proactively identify potential bottlenecks affecting end-user experience by measuring specific user actions.
Identifying and mitigating memory leaks and exceptions in IIS servers
However, the application is working well, and there is nothing to be worried about with it. Next, the solution will survey the server on which the application is hosted, whether it is on-premises or cloud-hosted. In this case, it is an IIS server hosted in the cloud. The tool will first analyze the server load and performance over the past few days and look for memory leakage and exceptions in top application pools. In-depth analysis of the CPU, memory, disk, network, and the resources in the servers including files, directories, ports, configurations and so on, will also help. After which, all the server and application logs will be analyzed.
Improving response times and error handling with detailed log analysis
The solution will provide IIS access logs, which can be used to study insights and capture various access details like page visits, client IPs, browser types, response times, error requests, and traffic. By leveraging these logs, the IT team at Zylker can address two critical aspects: response time optimization and error troubleshooting.
Because this case requires deeper diagnostics, IIS error logs and Windows Event logs come into play. While IIS error logs offer contextual information about encountered errors, Windows Event logs provide a quick trace of the root cause. By amalgamating insights from both logs, Zylker can efficiently diagnose and resolve issues affecting page performance.
Remediating high latency, packet loss and network anomalies by tracking physical and configuration changes
Now the server performance is optimal, and there is no anomaly in the logs. The next step is to scrutinize the entire tree of the network with all its devices. Zylker will track the network's performance with the six crucial metrics: response time, CPU usage, memory utilization, packet loss, latency, and throughput. Technicians will also check physical damage to the router, which can contribute to the high response time.
Then, the solution will analyze the NetFlow (i.e., the interface traffic) to see if the application is using more bandwidth than the optimal range. After this, the device configuration must be checked to see if there are any unauthorized changes. For instance, if it is an unknown IP address, a network administrator in Zylker will have to check if there is a device configuration change that allows blocked IP addresses. This can be done using network configuration management, a feature of the observability solution.
Observability: Monitoring and automation redefined
By tracking the above-said components, Zylker can spot the issue and fix it quickly to gain back the trust of its customers. Let's further explore how observability fits into the process.
Tackling complex infrastructure issues with automated observability for Zylker
If Zylker has its IT Infrastructure forged with a solid observability solution powered by AIOps like Site24x7, tracking can be completely automated. This includes 24/7 monitoring of all of its websites and applications, servers, containers, and network devices.
Monitoring, tracing, and logging will be done at all levels of Zylker's infrastructure for effective and swift issue identification and resolution.
Going beyond just monitoring, observability scrutinizes the underlying reason for the alerts received from monitoring, as well as providing the capability to examine obstacles that emerge from complex component interactions.
Achieving all-in-one IT resource visibility and incident reporting at Zylker
An observability solution will provide Zylker's customers with custom dashboards and reports that state the condition of the company's IT resources. The all-in-one view will enable Zylker to gain deeper insight into the health and performance of its IT components.
If there is any suspect or anomaly, how will Zylker know? One way is by receiving alerts through its preferred collaboration tools. As the alert is triggered on one side, a set of IT remedial automated actions will be simultaneously triggered on the other end to sustain the optimal functioning.
Or Zylker can know the status of its resources using the observability solution's incident report or the status page.
Leveraging AI forecasting for capacity planning and optimal resource management
But prevention is better than cure, they say. Observability solutions are not just for the present but also for predicting the future of IT operations and management. Site24x7's AI-powered Forecast engine analyzes performance trends based on the historical data of each of the key performance indicators and provides forecasts—based on which, Zylker can optimize its resources. This helps in capacity planning and ensures 100% uptime.
IT Infrastructure powered with observability
An IT Infrastructure powered by an observability setup can withstand the test of challenges faced in modern IT environments. Observability involves surveilling and monitoring your IT environment to detect anomalies and anticipate changes. It puts together metrics, events, traces, and logs, which are extensively analyzed to track the distributed system components communicating with each other. It also incorporates AIOps, cross-realm correlation, event correlation, and performance analytics as integral components of its operations.
Just like Zylker, when you fortify your IT Infrastructure with observability, you'll build resilience, maintain the trust of your users, and weather any IT storm.
Level up your IT Infrastructure with observability now!