[O.SI.2] Centralize tooling for streamlined system instrumentation and telemetry data interpretation

Category: FOUNDATIONAL

Centralized observability platforms are able to offer user-friendly, self-service capabilities to individual teams that simplify embedding visibility into system components and their dependencies. These tools streamline the onboarding process and offer auto-instrumentation capabilities to automate the monitoring of applications.

Adopt an observability platform that provides observability to teams using the X as a Service (XaaS) interaction mode as defined in the Team Topologies book by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. The platform needs to support ingesting the required data sources for effective monitoring, and provide the desired level of visibility into the system components and their dependencies.

Onboarding to the platform should be easy for teams, or support auto-instrumentation to automatically monitor applications for a hands-off experience. This enables the organization to achieve real-time visibility into system data and improve the ability to identify and resolve issues quickly.

The observability platform should offer capabilities to follow requests through the system, the services it interacts with, the state of the infrastructure that these services run on, and the impact of each of these on user experience. By understanding the entire request pathway, teams can identify where slowdowns or bottlenecks occur, whether this latency is caused by hardware or dependencies between microservices that weren't identified during development.

As the observability platform matures, it could begin to offer other capabilities such as trend analysis, anomaly detection, and automated responses, ultimately aiming to reduce the mean time to detect (MTTD) and the mean time to resolve (MTTR) any issues. This can lead to reduced downtime and improved ability to achieve desired business outcomes.

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