Introduction
The rapid expansion of public cloud services has allowed businesses to scale their operations effortlessly while also keeping costs down. But it’s not uncommon for billing to breach maximum thresholds now and then – and that could spell losses of hundreds of thousands in revenue every year. Cloud observability is one of the cornerstones of a well-optimized IT solution that determines the health of a system by assessing its workload based on various metrics. Context is a key component of cloud observability tools. Without the context provided by observability, it is difficult to optimize the cloud spending.
While the cloud can scale to adjust spikes in traffic, doing so will inevitably increase costs for your business. This is where cloud observability comes in. Some people speculate that cloud observability is just another buzzword for the headlines, but a quick glance will reveal that this is not the case.
Simply put, cloud monitoring lets you acquire raw data about your IT workloads, but it doesn’t dig deep to provide further context. Furthermore, cloud observability tools also provide actionable insights to simplify management across all business units and technology stacks deployed anywhere in the world. This, in turn, lets you reliably increase automation and scale up without the fear of incurring unnecessary costs.
Keeping Abreast of Resource Usage with Cloud Observability
As businesses grow, they generate a vast amount of telemetry data from their cloud environments. These large amounts of data can gradually increase expenses and wreak havoc on their monitoring systems. To calculate your needs for cloud resources, it is important to be aware of the “Total Cost of Ownership” (TCO) of your technology stack to understand the costs your teams will incur beyond the upfront price of the IT solution. TCO allows assess both direct and indirect expenses related to the cloud resource.
With TCO, you can account for the following expenses (other than the initial price tag):
- The cloud resources needed to implement a solution and keep it running
- The cloud resources needed to keep a solution and running it at scale
- How easily the solution integrates into an existing DevOps environment
While looking into all of the above, it becomes easy to see why the cost of observability is a bit more complicated than simply paying the upfront price of an IT solution and calling it a day. There is much more to TCO than meets the eye. This is why it is important to contextualize how certain factors affect the cost of cloud resources. Most organizations don’t define their TCO and end up making massive monetary losses due to data hikes they don’t understand.
Cloud Observability Isn’t Just a Fancy Term for Monitoring
Observability is not just a fancy moniker for monitoring. It goes one step further to provide end-to-end visibility into your cloud resources, giving users a bird’s eye view of the entire technology stack you are currently deploying.
With the help of cloud observability, DevOps teams are better equipped to:
- Deliver high-quality services at speed and scale
- Continue to innovate regularly
- Optimize investments in the cloud and IT components
- See their performance in real-time
When properly implemented, cloud observability can bridge the gap between business leaders, DevOps teams and developers.
How to Reign in Cloud Costs Using Observability
Logstail.com provides with monitoring tools that will show how much IT components cost to operate. Users get access to the raw numbers, how much computing units have cost during a certain period, as well as how much money was wasted on resources which were not necessary. So, what makes cloud observability so useful when it comes to saving expenses?
A Dashboard That’s Not a Pain to Use
Dashboards are designed to be effective tools, but they often only provide passive data that is hard to sift through. With cloud observability, users may view real-time visualizations that help pinpoint where attention is needed and understand the severity and scale of recent changes made across their telemetry data. This allows unravel unknown relationships and blind spots that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. When you can visualize real-time changes to your telemetry data, it becomes easier to understand where spikes are occurring and what may be causing those spikes. You’ll immediately identify issues across your IT resources and troubleshoot on the go.
Identify the Most Expensive IT Components
Moreover, this data can be broken up by various dimensions including application, region, and instance size. It becomes easier to see how expensive each aspect of your technology stack is to run and how you are utilizing the resources that have already been paid for. With the help of Logstail tools, you can decide if you really need certain apps and identify trends happening in real-time. You can also find more contextual information about your logs for additional insights into resource usage.
Get Suggestions on Cost Savings
With Logstail, users may see what their costs are and also gain actionable insights into resource utilization to avail cost-saving opportunities. They can view this information in a few clicks and set up alerts when billing exceeds the thresholds they have set. It also becomes easy to identify trends in spending and how they compare to other business metrics.
Easier and Faster Understanding of Issues
Getting access to information from multiple data silos (along with the necessary context) on a single dashboard, it gets easier to understand fluctuations in usages. You can also see real-time visualizations to improve optimization and troubleshooting. An important aspect of observability tools is that they must consolidate all your sources of data at a single, easy-to-read dashboard, from anywhere, in real-time. This tool can also let users build applications over their telemetry data to take advantage of insights before introducing a product. For example, users can build a software feature that tracks the cost of errors in business, attach a monetary value to those failures, and dig deep into the data to figure out why it might fail. This approach allows the maximization of chances to succeed when introducing a new product feature or app.
A Single Source of Truth
Most businesses have been collecting telemetry data for observability through agents deployed by DevOps teams. These agents collect metrics, events, log data, traces, and prepare them for display. This may have been an effective route in the past when there were fewer sources of data, but the industry has undergone rapid changes. Today, there are many sources of as well as frameworks and tools with their built-in traces, logs, and metrics. With cloud observability, users can collect data from all available sources and aggregate them in a single dashboard. Once they have a connected view of all data points in their system, it becomes easier to understand and resolve problems that affect the business.
Conclusion
While it certainly helps to get data from virtually anywhere, this isn’t enough for most businesses. All users’ streams of data need to be connected in such a way that they can understand the relationships between IT units. The goal of doing this is to provide more data context and meaning. Context allows the application of intelligence to very large data sets, anomalies, surface patterns, and correlations that are not easily identifiable manually.
In other words, cloud observability allows users identify how all their IT resources are related to one another at any moment in time. This isn’t possible to do manually if their cloud infrastructure changes by the minute. As teams add new services and shut down older ones, it becomes important to maintain cloud observability.
Our cloud-hosted solution with advanced features brings the functionality of centralized monitoring to your hands. Convert your data into actionable insights and maximize the performance of your infrastructure, or be notified of potential problems and take the appropriate actions. Sign-up for a free demo in order to realize the power of Logstail! Logstail will re-adjust the way you monitor your data and will help you get more meaningful insights of your technical logs, via dashboards and powerful graphs, to stay alert for all possible dangers.
In Logstail we are also offering the full range of services required to effectively mitigate cyber-attacks. Incident response and consulting, penetration testing, and red team operations, are altogether aiming to help our customers mitigate their cyber incidents. Contact us at sales@logstail.com to get a tailored offer for your business or get a free consultation by our team of globally recognized security experts!
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