So you’ve built your architecture and your applications, and you’ve got data – the lifeblood of your business – pumping through every artery. Effective observability keeps a watchful eye over the whole system, helping everything stay healthy.
As companies grow or scale up, digital transformation often becomes a core strategy. With increasing digitalization, the technologies powering businesses become more and more complex.
With systems made up of multiple databases, servers, applications, and increasingly complex architecture, monitoring the health of the entire system becomes vital – because a problem with one element might lead to a failure in others.
Observability is the all-seeing eye that helps you keep everything running smoothly and reliably. It helps you investigate the depths of your services by monitoring metrics, checking logs, investigating incidents, and alerting you of anything that doesn’t seem quite right.
Observability solutions go way beyond basic monitoring to provide a complete data healthcare ecosystem, so you’re always aware of what’s happening in the entire system, and can triage any incidents before they turn into problems.
Observability offers you granular insights into the health of your system. It gives you the clearest possible view of both your internal- and external-facing data architecture. Because the more you know your data, the more prepared you are for the unexpected.
Modern databases are surprisingly holistic. Everything’s connected like a living data organism. But that deep connectedness can also lead to unseen issues if there’s a communication breakdown between all of the individual parts.
You might already be using a bunch of different tools to observe and analyse your data, but if they’re not talking to each other, it can be hard to get an accurate picture of what’s going on. Instead of a clear overview, you end up with an overload of information that fails to reveal anything meaningful.
Sometimes, metrics produce so much information you can only store the data points for short periods due to cost and scalability issues. This leads to inefficient, and possibly inaccurate analysis. You might end up missing the point hidden inside the information that got discarded.
Monitoring alone doesn’t tell you why something is wrong. Observability can do this—as long as it’s getting accurate and up-to-date information. If your observability solution decides to take a nap, you might not be aware if something business-critical starts to go wrong.
"We promise our customers 99.99% uptime. That's a tall order. We need to see what our systems are doing all of the time, and when things go wrong we need targeted information about it in order to fix it quickly."
Mika Eloranta
Head of Technical Operations
Aiven provides a set of observability building blocks to help you solve all the common problems faced by deep and complex systems. Our tools allow you to create a centralized, scalable platform that suits your specific needs.
Aiven’s observability components combine a set of reliable blocks that connect seamlessly and work well together. You can use them to build a custom platform for your business combining metrics, monitoring, logging, analysis and diagnosis, alerting, and troubleshooting.
as a highly-scalable metrics engine
for visualisation and alerts
for examining logs with OpenSearch dashboards as search UI
Because our observability components are all available as part of Aiven’s services, it’s easy to integrate them into your existing systems, either by scaling up Prometheus by adding M3, or by using our tools to create your own comprehensive observability platform.
Simple scale up
Let’s say you’re already using a local Prometheus time series database, but you’ve realised it doesn’t scale as much as you need.
Total perspective
You’ve already got the ultimate data environment. Now you want to build the ultimate open source observability platform.
Observability produces a huge amount of data. The trick to making it work is balancing that data with storage capacity – so that you don’t lose critical information. The more high-quality information available, the higher the chance of identifying issues earlier.
Monitor and bring in logs from whatever nodes you want to observe, using collection agents such as Telegraf and Logstash.
Aiven’s observability components allow you to aggregate data to both reduce storage needs, and significantly reduce query time, so analysis and results can be generated in close to real time.
Regardless of the observability solution you create—whether you’re scaling up Prometheus with M3 or building something using the components in our observability package—their pricing is all-inclusive. There are no additional or hidden fees for the cloud provider and storage plan you choose.
Increase your servers, storage, or migrate to a different provider at the push of a button, with zero downtime.
Close to real-time view and alerts help you make sure your systems are always at their best.
Observe 10s of thousands of nodes – so you’re prepared for anything.
Familiar Aiven tooling gets you up and running in minutes, and easy customization keeps everything flexible.
Like everything Aiven does, open source is the beating heart.
End-to-end encryption, dedicated VMs, full compliance certifications.
Ready-made dashboards galore to get your visualization started.
Our backup tool Astacus keeps your data safe – so you never have to worry.
Customers love our expert 24/7 support, available 365 days a year.
Want the full perspective on your systems? Take a deep dive with a free trial. Or contact sales for a personalised solution.
"We need to see what our systems are doing all of the time, and when things go wrong we need targeted information in order to fix it quickly."
Mika Eloranta
Head of Technical Operations
"M3 was the best heavy-duty option. It’s used by several large companies and it’s horizontally scalable. Its architecture is also simple enough to be robust and comprehensible."
Markus Stenberg
Software Engineer
"We eat our own dog food. Because we use the products we offer to customers ourselves, we know how they work from a user perspective."
Mika Eloranta
Head of Technical Operations