On February 8th, Linux Polska hosted hands-on workshops on IT environment observability with Splunk ITSI. During the session, participants had the opportunity to engage in practical tasks within a virtual environment, supervised by an experienced Splunk architect.
During the workshops, we hosted administrators of IT systems and analysts. Our focus centered on presenting the possibilities of the Splunk IT Service Intelligence platform for improving the observability of services, applications, IT infrastructures, and the supply of information about occurring issues and their causes.
But what exactly is observability, and how can Splunk be helpful in achieving it?
Observability is a model of working with data. This model enables the company to understand what is happening on each and every layer of its digital ecosystem – from the hardware and system infrastructure to IT services, applications, business processes, and the network layer.
Observability in IT systems is based on the three pillars – metrics, logs and traces. Implementation of this approach in reality requires:
- tools for gathering data from various sources in real-time, which allow for evaluating the state of the systems and determining the causes of abnormalities;
- designing and managing the digital ecosystems in such a way, for it to provide useful data;
- increasing the awareness of the IT teams in terms of interpreting the data about the systems and detecting the causes of the issues;
- building a proactive approach to failure management, sharing data between teams, and improving the systems.
Implementation of observability in the organization provides many benefits, such as:
- obtaining full visibility of the components of the digital ecosystem, crucial to a business, such as services, applications, microservices, system, and hardware infrastructure;
- reacting to malfunctions and signals of the incoming incidents in the real time;
- quicker handling of the incidents, minimizing the effects of failures and preventing them in the future;
- gathering the historical data, analyzing the causes of incidents, looking for the correlations and trends;
- diagnosing which components of the digital ecosystem need improving, based on the analysis of the cause and course of the failure.
Moreover, the data observing may be also used to: make better business decisions and to mitigate the risks, improve the quality of the manufactured software’s code, facilitate the administrative work and to much more.
Splunk ITSI is a comprehensive tool, which allows for gathering, analyzing and visualizing of the data from many sources such as system logs, applications, or data from the network devices in the real time.
Thanks to that, it is easy to identify, solve and indicate the sources of various issues, before they become critical. A transparent interface facilitates the evaluation of the state and quality of the IT services, and also enables quick detection and solving of potential abnormalities.
All of the above make ITSI a powerful tool for organizations, which want to increase the observability of their IT services and keep them on the highest level of efficiency and reliability.
If you are interested in the practical usage of the Splunk ITSI utility in observability, please contact our experts
