Seeing is Believing: Announcing the DevOps Pulse 2019 with a Focus on Observability

In the world of Software Engineering, observability seems to be the talk of the town. We discuss it at conferences, read about it in blogs or articles, and see it promised to us by vendor after vendor.

But what is observability? What issues have recently evolved to make it such an integral concept? What strategies are engineers employing to ensure observability? And most importantly of all, why are engineers looking to achieve it?

As new technologies such as microservices, serverless, containers and others have evolved and gained prominence, applications have become increasingly distributed and environments incredibly complex. 

While DevOps Engineers are still tasked with ensuring the availability and performance of their products, doing so has become more difficult because of the massive explosion of data and the various components they must constantly look after. Therefore, gaining actionable insights from all the data produced, understanding the inner workings of their systems, and having a full picture of their environments is often a messy and convoluted process. 

Hence, the concept of observability. In theory, observability is the answer to the problems highlighted above. Some say it’s combining metrics, traces, and logs in order to gain a better picture of what’s occurring in your environment. Others believe it is simply a trendy term for monitoring. 

Every year, the Logz.io DevOps Pulse uncovers the evolving trends, technologies, and challenges that we face as an industry. Our goal is to gain a better understanding of what is occurring on the ground so we can create a better, more productive future. 

Since more and more organizations are jumping on the observability bandwagon, it’s time to learn why we’re doing it and what strategies and tactics we are using to make this vision a reality. So, in addition to our usual examination of DevOps trends, our DevOps Pulse 2019 will also feature a special section dedicated to observability.

Some examples of questions include:

• Which technologies do you feel are an obstacle to observability?
• Which practices/methods do you feel are most critical for achieving observability? 
• What type of observability tools are you using?
• What do you feel are the biggest challenges for achieving complete observability? 
•  Who bears the majority of responsibility for ensuring observability?

Your participation in the DevOps Pulse 2019 will help you develop a better understanding of what the term observability means to your peers, how they are using this strategy to optimize product performance, and what challenges we as an industry still need to tackle.

Remember the more responses we get, the more accurate the results. So please take a few minutes to answer the following questions and share with friends and colleagues! As a special thank you, those who complete the survey will be entered into a raffle to win a $300 Amazon gift card. As always, all your answers are 100% anonymous.

Stay tuned for the results in just a few weeks!