SLO is increasingly used to achieve observability ｜ Devops

【  Source of the article  】https://devops.com/increasing-use-of-slos-to-enable-observability/

In most  IT  And operation Department , Observability is a developing discipline . In order to release stable software faster , Operators need to continuously understand performance 、 Indicators such as uptime and availability . therefore , Engineers are comprehensively increasing their service level targets (SLO)  Use —— A recent study found that ,82%  Our company is increasing its support for  SLO  Use .

SLO  You can gain insight into the performance of a specific application , Station Reliability Engineer (SRE) It is often used to ensure quality and avoid service interruption . More Than This , All teams are still  SLO  Relate to all aspects of the business , To reduce costs and help guide decisions . Although many environments have visibility , But there are still gaps .

Nobl9  Recently released a project for  IT  A global survey of professionals and executives , The survey tracked  2022  Service level target status in . We will look at the main findings in the report , And consider their impact on  SLO  The significance of state and overall observability .

And observability  SRE  state

in general , Site reliability engineering is still maturing in various organizations . Even though there is only  31%  Our company adopted  SRE, But it is expected to have great growth in the future , because  46%  Of the companies said they plan to adopt  SRE.

These operators now face many cloud native observability tools , These tools are taking indicators 、 Massive data is generated in the form of logs and links .39%  The company uses  6  To  10  An observability and monitoring tool ,35%  Of companies use more than  11  Kind of .

Now there are so many tools deployed , Who is using this observability and monitoring data ？ stay  74%  In our company , Observable data supports operational needs . The operation team is most likely to use  SLO  To monitor uptime 、 Performance and overall efficiency . After the operation team , The security team also uses this observable data  (71%), It makes sense , because  SLO  You can notify the event response . The next area is customer support 、 Compliance and capacity planning .

An interesting discovery is , Only  42%  The company uses  SLO  To comply with service level agreements  (SLA). This shows that  SLO  Most commonly used for internal optimization and decision making .

Mixed environments complicate visibility

Most companies track  SLO  To improve its impact on the network  (83%)、 database  (76%)  And Applications  (75%)  The visibility of . Other major areas include private cloud environments and traditional computing arrangements . however , Although observability is a trend , But organizations still lack full visibility into the entire stack .

It is worth noting that , Nearly half  (46%)  Of respondents said , Their monitoring and observability tools are not available to all of their companies  IT  Full visibility of assets . for example , Only  45%  Companies can see their containers , Only  35%  Companies can see their microservice architecture .

Due to the increase of mixed clouds and cloudy conditions , Lack of full stack visibility can become complex , because  78%  Percent said that mixed cloud environments make monitoring infrastructure more difficult .

track  SLO  The benefits of

The report will  SLO  Defined as “ Over time for a given system 、 Applications   or   Performance and availability goals set by the service ”. For organizations that follow these goals , The benefits are obvious —— They can help improve performance 、 Make direct decisions and help avoid downtime .

therefore ,70%  Our company currently uses  SLO. The following is the tracking  SLO  Some of the benefits of ：

• Improve the performance of microservices ：87%  Of people said that they used in the microservice architecture  SLO  It can improve service performance .

• Enable full stack observability ：58%  Of people said that some of their company  SLO  Mapped to business operations .

• Improve business decisions ：91%  Of people agree to use  SLO  Help drive better business decisions .

• Prevent service interruption ：67%  Person representation , Their company passed  SLO  Threshold alerts prevent business interruption .

• Reduce expenses ：90%  Person representation  SLO  Saved money for their company .

The last thought

More teams are tracking service level goals . Most are not used  SLO  The company  (71%)  Now plan to adopt them as soon as possible . Data show that , Observability market is a growing field , There is room for growth . About SRE  The role can also be said like this .

Not all companies use exactly the same roles or monitoring procedures , Who is using  SLO  And how to apply them may continue to differ . in any case , The study shows that , survey  SLO  It is possible to benefit the software lifecycle in many ways .