What Keeps Alex Awake

Introduction

Alex (Lead Engineer, Cloud Operations, NextGen Solutions) is well aware of the complexity involved in running cloud-native applications. The distributed nature of these applications, which often consist of numerous microservices, containers, and serverless functions, can make monitoring a daunting task. The stakes are high: poor monitoring can lead to performance degradation, prolonged downtime, and ultimately a loss of revenue and customer confidence. Adding to the complexity is the fact that Alex’s team deploys these applications in public clouds like AWS, which brings its own set of monitoring challenges and opportunities.

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Alex can’t afford to waste time sifting through logs and metrics to determine the root cause of a problem. Instead of just telling his DevOps team, “We’re having latency issues, can you take a look at this?”, Alex wants to provide precise insights. He wants to say, “We have a 20% increase in latency in the ‘Payment’ microservice; this is impacting our checkout process; here are the associated logs and metrics; these are the potential business impacts; and these are the recommended steps to resolve the issue”. This level of detail is invaluable for rapid troubleshooting.

To achieve this, Alex and his team are focused on addressing the following challenges:

  • Reduce time to detection of problems from hours to minutes by implementing real-time monitoring and alerts.
  • Get a comprehensive view of application performance, from front-end to back-end, including all microservices and databases.
  • Identify bottlenecks, errors, and anomalies within the application in production and propose actionable steps to fix them.
  • Improve collaboration between DevOps, development, and business teams by sharing contextual observation data.
  • Prioritize issues based on their impact on critical business transactions, enabling more effective resource allocation.

In addition, Alex is keen to incorporate open standards into its monitoring strategy, particularly OpenTelemetry, to ensure interoperability and future-proofing of its monitoring solutions.

By addressing these challenges, Alex aims to develop a robust observability strategy that not only ensures optimal application performance, but also enables his team to be more proactive, efficient, and aligned with business goals.


Coming Up Next  

We’ll explore how Cisco Cloud Observability (CCO) allows Alex to rest easy, knowing his applications are well-monitored.