As cloud-native applications continue to evolve, traditional APM tools and metrics-driven health checks prove insufficient. The modern IT landscape calls for an innovative approach - observability. Beyond basic metrics, observability emphasizes request tracing across services, providing a comprehensive view of application health and enabling in-depth root cause analysis, something traditional APM tools fail to offer.

Let's look at some key reasons to use observability to monitor cloud-native applications: 

• Metrics alone aren't enough to understand the health of cloud-native applications: 
• By providing granular operational data in context, observability can help end the "blame game":
• APM is about knowing WHAT happened. Observability is about understanding WHY it happened. 
• Capturing every request - without sampling - provides key granular detail about 'hotspots.'
• Operational data must be ingested at execution time - not after a failure has occurred. 
• Software must be smart enough to only interrupt human operators on user-impacting issues. 

Benedict Fernandes, IBM IT Architect, and Brian Safron, IBM Program Director for Portfolio Product Management, authors of the expert paper “Observability is the new APM for cloud-native applications.” walked us through their insights and answered questions from the audience during our session, which you can watch below: 

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If you have not read the paper, you can read it here.

Make sure to check out our previous episodes here.