Observability - the bird’s eye view of your systems

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.

What is Observability?

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.

A holistic healthcare solution for your data

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.

  • Monitoring - Round the clock metrics on health and performance
  • Logging - Intake and indexing of data logs
  • Incident investigation - Search logs and metrics to identify problems
  • Visualisation - View vital statistics on graphical dashboards
  • Alerting - On point notifications so you’re always informed

Prevention is better than cure

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.

Observability problems – and the tools to solve them

The knee bone’s connected to the data pipeline

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.

Observability problems

Too much information

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.

Too little information

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.

Information breakdown

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.

Aiven for Observability – the open source observability toolset

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.

  • Scalability – give full visibility to the status of your systems with an infinitely scalable observability platform.
  • High availability – 99.99% uptime for reliable, systems-wide observation that doesn’t fall asleep at the wheel
  • Easy incident investigation - collect and store all relevant metrics to ensure you have all the data you need.
  • Hit the ground running - get all our observability building blocks included as part of the package

Building observability

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.

M3

as a highly-scalable metrics engine

Grafana®

for visualisation and alerts

OpenSearch®

for examining logs with OpenSearch dashboards as search UI

Aiven observability components

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

Adding Aiven for M3 to Prometheus

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.

  • Aiven for M3 can be used out of the box to scale your local Prometheus environment up to a massive scale. It’s like going from limited to unlimited at the flick of a switch.
  • Combine multiple Prometheus nodes. Aggregate data from multiple Prometheus environments to a centralized cloud storage, making data easier to analyze.
  • Optional M3 Aggregator service to reduce storage needs and speed up query time.
  • With 99.99% uptime, you won’t miss a beat.

Total perspective

Aiven’s observability toolset

You’ve already got the ultimate data environment. Now you want to build the ultimate open source observability platform.

  • Our observability components offer you unlimited scalability, with the ability to run 10s of thousands of nodes.
  • Use M3 to aggregate all your metrics data in one place, at customizable resolutions, making it easier – and faster – to analyze and report on.
  • Logs management with OpenSearch for examining logs with OpenSearch dashboards as search UI
  • Grafana for visualisation dashboards and alerts – with many ready-made dashboards available
  • Deploy in minutes, and integrate our components at the click of a mouse.
  • 99.99% uptime so you’re notified at the first sign of trouble.

Observability at scale

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.

Observe whatever you want...

Monitor and bring in logs from whatever nodes you want to observe, using collection agents such as Telegraf and Logstash.

Aggregate to accelerate

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.

...and pay for what you need

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.

Why Aiven?

Simple scalability

Increase your servers, storage, or migrate to a different provider at the push of a button, with zero downtime.

Never miss a beat

Close to real-time view and alerts help you make sure your systems are always at their best.

Scalable monitoring

Observe 10s of thousands of nodes – so you’re prepared for anything.

Ease of use

Familiar Aiven tooling gets you up and running in minutes, and easy customization keeps everything flexible.

Open source

Like everything Aiven does, open source is the beating heart.

Security built-in

End-to-end encryption, dedicated VMs, full compliance certifications.

Grafana dashboards

Ready-made dashboards galore to get your visualization started.

Automatic backups

Our backup tool Astacus keeps your data safe – so you never have to worry.

World class support

Customers love our expert 24/7 support, available 365 days a year.

See for yourself

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