Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - Correlate cloud performance metrics directly with business impact (PRT203)

Summary

• Nirmal Mehta, a principal specialist solution architect at AWS, discusses the importance of observability in cloud environments and its correlation with business value.
• Observability is essential for operations and foundational for well-architected systems that deliver business value.
• AWS customers seek innovation, global market competition, value delivery, speed, reliability, security, and low cost of ownership.
• AWS CTO's statement "everything fails all the time" reflects the need for robust engineering practices and observability.
• Observability helps respond to failures, enhances customer experience, and improves business uptime and reliability.
• Case studies: Match.com and Jobvite successfully migrated to AWS Container Services using AppDynamics for comprehensive observability.
• Sundar, a partner from AppDynamics, discusses the challenges of cloud-native observability, such as disconnected silos of data, and introduces AppDynamics Cloud.
• AppDynamics Cloud is built on three core principles: full-stack correlation, open telemetry compliance, and AI/ML for faster root cause analysis (RCA).
• Cisco's vision for full-stack observability (FSO) is to provide a single platform for observability across Cisco and third-party applications.
• The FSO platform aims to reduce configuration complexity, enable extensibility, and provide a common platform for insights.
• AppDynamics Cloud addresses business-focused observability, cross-melt troubleshooting, and AI-assisted RCA.
• The demo showcases how AppDynamics Cloud helps troubleshoot a common Kubernetes issue related to incorrect memory limits in a blue-green deployment scenario.

Insights

• Observability is not just a technical requirement but a strategic business enabler that can directly impact customer satisfaction and revenue.
• The move to cloud-native architectures increases the complexity of systems, making traditional observability tools insufficient.
• The integration of business metrics with observability data allows teams to prioritize issues based on business impact, not just technical severity.
• Open standards like OpenTelemetry are becoming increasingly important in the observability space, providing flexibility and choice for users.
• AI/ML is playing a crucial role in reducing the noise of alerts and helping teams focus on the most critical issues for faster resolution.
• The concept of full-stack observability is evolving to include not just technical metrics but also business context, security insights, and cost management.
• The ability to correlate data across different types of monitoring data (metrics, events, logs) is crucial for understanding complex system behaviors and reducing mean time to detection and resolution.
• The entity-centric model proposed by AppDynamics Cloud simplifies the correlation of data from multiple sources, reducing the burden on users to manually establish relationships between entities.
• The demo highlights the practical application of AppDynamics Cloud in a real-world scenario, demonstrating its effectiveness in identifying and resolving issues quickly.