Intelligent Automation for Cloud Observability
Key Points
- Observability combines logs, events, metrics, traces, and dependencies to monitor application health and pinpoint problems, which is critical in cloud‑native environments with rapidly changing, loosely‑coupled microservices.
- Traditional monitoring tools rely on manual data collection, dashboard creation, and alert configuration, leading to “incident fatigue” because alerts often lack the context needed for quick diagnosis.
- IBM Instana APM automates the discovery of services and infrastructure components, eliminating the need for developers to embed extensive logging code and allowing operations teams to focus on root‑cause analysis rather than manual data gathering.
- By providing always‑available, contextualized dashboards that map application, platform, and infrastructure relationships, Instana delivers the relevant data fast, enabling teams to understand service dependencies, configurations, and performance at a glance.
Full Transcript
# Intelligent Automation for Cloud Observability **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnHauPlPp3o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnHauPlPp3o) **Duration:** 00:04:04 ## Summary - Observability combines logs, events, metrics, traces, and dependencies to monitor application health and pinpoint problems, which is critical in cloud‑native environments with rapidly changing, loosely‑coupled microservices. - Traditional monitoring tools rely on manual data collection, dashboard creation, and alert configuration, leading to “incident fatigue” because alerts often lack the context needed for quick diagnosis. - IBM Instana APM automates the discovery of services and infrastructure components, eliminating the need for developers to embed extensive logging code and allowing operations teams to focus on root‑cause analysis rather than manual data gathering. - By providing always‑available, contextualized dashboards that map application, platform, and infrastructure relationships, Instana delivers the relevant data fast, enabling teams to understand service dependencies, configurations, and performance at a glance. ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnHauPlPp3o&t=0s) **Observability: Automation and Context** - The speaker explains that in cloud‑native microservice environments traditional, manual monitoring falls short, and IBM’s Instana APM delivers observability by automating data collection, providing contextual information, and enabling intelligent actions to quickly pinpoint and resolve problems. ## Full Transcript
you probably know about observability
it's an umbrella term referring to all
the logs events metrics traces and
dependencies associated with your
business applications
this data is used to monitor application
health and when needed pinpoint the
cause of problems
but why is observability so important to
your business and it operations
hi i'm dan keen from ibm cloud
it started with a move from traditional
application architecture to one based on
cloud technology
with the move to cloud you need full
visibility because of the explosion of
ever-changing microservices
and because they're loosely coupled by
design it's difficult to know about
their interdependencies the bottom line
traditional monitoring tools are manual
and they don't do enough
cloud-based monitoring tools need end
and visibility
they also avoid another itops problem
incident fatigue
this happens when incident alerts lack
sufficient context details for problem
diagnosis
so to assure application performance you
don't need more data you need
intelligent automation
that's why ibm observability by instant
apm exists
it delivers on the promise of
observability that is not just knowing
that a problem is happening but knowing
why it's happening and how to fix it
instanton our approaches enterprise
observability with three principles
automation contextualized info and
intelligent action let's take a look at
each
first up automation
as i mentioned earlier traditional
monitoring strategies are largely manual
developers manually write data
collectors and trace code they also
manually discover dependencies
operations teams manually build
dashboards they manually configure
alerting rules and thresholds
you get the idea there's a lot of manual
effort
developers want to spend their time
writing new business code not writing
logging code
installer reduces the need for manual
logging by automating the discovery of
your app's services and its supporting
infrastructure components your teams can
then focus on getting to the root cause
quickly instead of tediously combing
through a mountain of error logs
these components are correlated to
provide key contextual information when
diagnosing problems
okay now that we've covered how
automation can reduce the observability
burden let's turn to the next instantial
principle contextual information
contextualization isn't a new problem
but it's made worse by the increase of
service independencies and loss of
technology choices
to be efficient your team needs relevant
data fast
the instanta always available context
enables ready to use dashboards that
quickly navigate from application to
platform to infrastructure it visualizes
relationships to answer questions like
what services are used by my application
what clusters it depend on or even what
is my container's configuration
instantia contextualized the
infrastructure resources that is what
pod container cluster storage and so on
are being used
now that we've got contextualized
application data what does instantona
mean by intelligent actions
it means quicker resolution because
instanto correlates events for root
cause determination
these correlations are based on known
best practices
for example using the application
perspective you can drill down with
dashboards based on industry accepted
sre golden signals
of course you can create custom
dashboards however it comes out of the
box with pre-configured views that are
based on years of feedback from sres
so to wrap this up
ibm observability by install automates
discovery and configuration it also
turns data into contextual information
allowing you to take intelligent action
imagine reducing your debug time by 75
percent and that's just the beginning
ibm is a recognized leader in ai aiops
solutions and we're ready to help no
matter where you are in your aiops
journey thanks for watching if you'd
like to see more videos like this in the
future please click like and subscribe
and if you want to learn more about ibm
observability by instant apm make sure
to check out the links in the
description