What is Observability?

Oftentimes, companies can face too much data and overwhelming noise and how they solve it can be challenging. Some large customers can generate 10,000 events a month across their IT organization. Does this sound familiar?

Does your team suffer from “alert fatigue” and need “noise reduction” to solve this problem? 

Many companies have a variety of monitoring tools that may not necessarily work seamlessly together. Some of these tools may reside in different tech stacks, some may be for infrastructure (network, storage, server, cloud), end user monitoring, or application performance monitoring. 

As the tools you use for monitoring increase, so does the number of events. Events are a historical view of when a metric crossed a threshold or perhaps out of compliance.  Typically, by the time an event has been reported, the opportunity to quickly act has passed. So how then would we be able to understand the context of these events earlier, and in turn quickly act?

Let’s use a self-driving car analogy here to dive deeper into observability. If a person is manually driving and only looking in the rear-view mirror, they can see what has already happened - but without looking forward, they can’t see what is in front of them.

So when we’re looking to create a self-driving car – i.e. introducing automation, one wouldn’t use past events in order to look at what is coming down the road to steer the vehicle.

Back to IT infrastructure – how can you look at these events such as slow application response time, high CPU utilization on virtual machines, or failed database connections – are these isolated events or are they related? 

It is very difficult for any observability platform to guess at this if you don’t have any application context to know if these are related, mostly because they came from different monitoring tools. It’s key to understand the application to resource relationships. This is where the IBM Instana Action Framework delivers significant opportunity for you to get ahead of the game, resolve core issues faster through event correlation leveraging AI.  IBM Instana paired with Red Hat Ansible Automation is a can’t be beat combination.

Centralized management of Event-Driven Ansible

Organizations come in all shapes and sizes, and automation activities should not be performed as bespoke operations. Paired with IBM Instana as an event source, Event-Driven Ansible Controller provides a way to organize all the components and activities necessary for managing Event-Driven Ansible in a single user interface, making it easy to set up, configure and operate - all based on the correlation of evets coming from Instana. There is no longer a need to run command-line operations or set up and install tooling on individual machines to achieve the same functionality provided by Event-Driven Ansible.  You now set yourself up for success and self-service of incident and problem management.

Familiar workflow for Ansible Automation Platform users

For users who have prior experience working within Ansible Automation Controller, Event-Driven Ansible Controller features many of the same constructs, so getting up to speed is a breeze. Resources, such as Projects and Credentials, have the same meaning, while others have their own Event-Driven Ansible construct. Instead of Execution Environments, Event-Driven Ansible executions are performed within Decision Environments. This provides an operating environment for Event-Driven Ansible Rulebooks and includes any of the dependencies that they require.

Operating with a security first mindset

“Shadow” development and operations are real struggles in many organizations. Instead of each individual working in their own environment with their own tooling and development processes, Instana’s Action Framework can identify correlated events and leveage, Event-Driven Ansible Controller to provide a  a centralized management and execution plane for Event-Driven-Ansible. The centralization of Event-Driven Ansible components, including Decision Environments and Rulebooks (defined by Instana events), ensures that only sources from trusted contents can be used while applying Role Based Access Control (RBAC) paradigms to increase security and reliability. 

Expected outcomes

In addition to these benefits, impactful business outcomes will include:

●      Reduced event response time for tracked event sources.

●      Reduced overall number of tickets/events responses.

●      Automated decision making for repeatable and known tasks.

●      The ability to create further rulebooks and enhance automation processes.

Getting started

Automation has greatly reduced the time necessary to complete tasks, but still these tasks often require manual identification, intervention and execution to resolve issues. This can cause reduced productivity through constant context-switching, or worse, after-hours or on-call work to resolve. Event-Driven Ansible can help fill that gap, analyzing event sources and automatically running automation to resolve issues, no human input required.

Next Steps

●      Try an Ansible Automation Platform 60-day trial

●      Learn more about Event-Driven Ansible

●      Go here to access the IBM Instana/Red Hat Ansible certified collection