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Observability

June 26, 2023
Contributed by: 
C

Due to the increasing complexity of modern applications, monitoring and troubleshooting applications is becoming more challenging for IT teams. Also, gaining visibility into the behavior of infrastructure and applications are more critical for software development teams. Observability bridges this gap by providing deeper insights into the entire infrastructure. Observability tools can collect application or system performance telemetry continuously by integrating with various IT infrastructure components and provides holistic visibility into your IT infrastructure.

Some of the benefits of observability can be summarized as:

  • Faster troubleshooting: Detailed data insights obtained from observability tools help you to diagnose and troubleshoot system issues faster.
  • Enhanced application performance: Monitoring key metrics and identifying issues helps developers to make data-driven decisions to improve application performance.
  • Improved reliability and better user experience: Observability data allows developers to proactively resolve system failures that may disrupt user experience.

What is observability

Observability is the ability to understand the internal state of a system by analyzing the data it produces, such as logs, metrics, traces, and events. Observability enables you to understand and answer specific questions about the behavior of your system when failures occur. With a deep understanding of your systems you can be better prepared for the unknowns. For example, you can track how slow or fast, what is broken, and what should be done to enhance system performance.

Metrics, logs, and traces are the key pillars of observability.

  • Metrics: Metrics are a numeric representation of data that are measured over a certain period of time. Metric data is useful to track the health of a system over time. These numerical measurements include CPU usage, memory usage, and error rates.

  • Logs: Logs are messages or records that describe events that happened at a particular point in time. Usually, these messages or records are generated by an application or system.

  • Traces: Traces represent the journey of a request as it moves through the different parts of a distributed system. Traces document how a request is processed and how long it takes to complete. This data can help identify bottlenecks and other latency issues.

Monitoring vs Observability

Monitoring is a set of tools or solutions to inform you when something is wrong. With observability you can identify what is happening and quickly pinpoint the root of the issues to know why it happened. It integrates the facts and data generated by monitoring to offer you a thorough view of your system performance and health. Using observability, you can automatically analyze your data and improve user experiences based on a rapid, accurate input.

Observability with NetScaler

When NetScaler is deployed as a proxy for application deployments, NetScaler inspects each user request or response for global routing and local data center routing. With the thousands of logs and counters provided by NetScaler you can have granular information about HTTP, TCP, SSL, and DNS packets. You can leverage such rich data and insights from NetScaler to troubleshoot and pinpoint issues. You can export the data from NetScaler to your preferred observability endpoints to create visualizations and get real-time, granular application insights.

NetScaler provides integrations with popular observability tools such as Prometheus, Splunk, ElasticSerach, and Kafka. Direct integration of NetScaler is available with Prometheus. With direct integration, there is no need to deploy any additional agent or node to export the data and build customized dashboards of your needs. Prometheus focuses on time series data monitoring which collects numeric metrics from all entities.

NetScaler Console has several built-in observability capabilities such as SSL insights, web transaction insights, and API insights.

NetScaler can provide three kinds of insights as part of observability:

  • Application and API insights: Application health insights help with troubleshooting which application website has high latency or an elevated number of errors or subpar performance. It also includes monitoring errors, traffic, latency, and saturation metrics. Collectively these signals are known as the golden signals for monitoring the state of applications.
  • Application and API security insights: Application security insights include WAF violations detected or prevented compared to the overall traffic, the top application affected by WAF or BOT violations, and CVEs, BOT classifications like good and bad bots, and provides information on attackers.
  • Network infrastructure insights: NetScaler infrastructure insights include information about the NetScaler such as the CPU utilization, memory and disk usage, and network interface telemetry. You can also get specific feature level insights like SSL, GSLB, Multipath TCP (MPTCP) and insights for SSL TLS monitoring like certificate expiry details, protocol used, and cipher strength.

For detailed information on directly exporting metrics to Prometheus from NetScaler, see Monitoring NetScaler, applications, and application security using Prometheus.

Observability
June 26, 2023
Contributed by: 
C
June 26, 2023
Contributed by: 
C

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