Achieve business goals with full application observability

Understanding the business process view

The business process view involves assessing applications through the lens of their contribution to business processes. It emphasizes the importance of understanding how application performance directly impacts critical business results.

The importance of aligning application performance with business goals

By aligning monitoring solutions with business processes and setting relevant SLAs and SLOs, organizations can ensure that performance metrics reflect essential business objectives. This helps teams prioritize performance improvements that enhance user experiences and drive business growth.

A case study: Application observability in action with Site24x7

Let's imagine an application named Zylker, which has both web and mobile versions. The application is comprised of a customer-facing front end, back-end APIs for processing orders, microservices for payments and logistics, and database servers.

Business goals and key functions

• Increase customer acquisition and retention through seamless user experiences across web and mobile platforms.
• Enhance system performance for operational efficiency and scalability during peak times.
• Ensure that the application consistently meets SLAs and SLOs to maintain customer trust.
• Leverage analytics for business insights to optimize marketing and sales.

Observability tools like Site24x7 provide the Zylker team with metrics to track user interactions, order processing, and delivery times, enabling proactive issue resolution, performance optimization, and seamless user experiences.

Application performance monitoring: The core of observability

Application performance monitoring (APM) is the cornerstone of application observability. Site24x7's APM tool captures detailed metrics concerning application performance, enabling proactive monitoring and troubleshooting. With multi-platform support, it seamlessly monitors applications across diverse environments, including Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Ruby, and mobile platforms, ensuring comprehensive performance insights.

Enhancing user experiences and business reliability with transaction monitoring

Monitoring Zylker's key transactions, like user logins, order placements, and payment processing, is crucial for both user satisfaction and business reliability. Delays in these processes, such as slow payments or delivery updates, can lead to customer frustration and lost orders. With transaction monitoring, the Zylker team can gain insights into response times, throughput, and error rates to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks effectively, enhancing user experiences and the brand's reputation.

Boosting application efficiency and reducing latency with code-level monitoring

Zylker's team needs to identify performance bottlenecks, which lead to slow response times, high latency, and an overall poor user experience. Code-level monitoring can help the team identify precisely where delays occur, whether from slow database queries, poorly optimized methods, or external dependencies like third-party payment gateways. By drilling down into the code, the Zylker team can quickly identify and resolve performance issues to boost application efficiency and reduce latency for smoother user experiences.

Ensuring application stability with error tracking and exception analysis

When the Zylker application experiences sudden spikes in errors, especially during peak hours, it becomes challenging for the team to identify and resolve the underlying issues quickly. The error tracking and exception analysis features of Site24x7's APM tool provide real-time visibility into issues as they occur. Detailed stack traces and contextual information enable the Zylker team to pinpoint root causes quickly and efficiently.

Maximizing business insights with the MELT framework for complete observability

The MELT framework provides the required data sources for maintaining a robust observability strategy.

Metrics: Measure resource efficiency and application health

• Challenge: Resource inefficiency and undetected application issues during periods of high traffic
• Solution: Monitor system metrics (like CPU, memory, and disk usage) to identify resource bottlenecks, application metrics (like response times and error rates) for transaction insights, and database metrics (like query execution times) to resolve slow queries impacting order placements.

Events: Track changes and incident resolution

• Challenge: A lack of visibility into application changes and incident handling
• Solution: Track application events (like deployments and scaling) and incident events (like downtime and failed health checks). For instance, immediate alerts for payment service failures will enable faster resolution.

Logs: Gain insightful diagnostics and historical context

• Challenge: Diagnosing performance issues without actionable insights
• Solution: Analyze logs from servers, applications, and custom events. Correlate spikes in response times with logs to trace root causes, such as a failed deployment or infrastructure misconfiguration.

Traces: Ensure seamless microservices communication

• Challenge: Identifying delays in a microservices architecture
• Solution: Distributed tracing maps the request flow across order, payment, and delivery services. End-to-end request tracing ensures that delays, like a timeout in the payment gateway, are quickly identified and resolved.

Businesses often face challenges when monitoring distributed systems due to varied data formats and tools. OpenTelemetry standardizes metrics, traces, and logs, enabling consistent data collection across microservices. For e-commerce platforms, this ensures real-time tracking of user interactions and back-end dependencies while identifying performance issues. With OpenTelemetry support, businesses can seamlessly integrate existing telemetry data, ensuring simplified application observability.

Proactive alerting and incident management: Ensuring business continuity

A robust alerting and incident management strategy can help the Zylker team monitor essential metrics and act swiftly if there is any performance anomaly.

• Threshold-based alerts: By configuring alerts for application metrics (e.g., a response time above two seconds) and system metrics (e.g., memory usage above 85%), Zylker’s operations team will get notified if an alert threshold is crossed.
  
• Zia-based dynamic threshold alerts: The Zylker team can configure alerts for application metrics (e.g., response times) and system metrics (e.g., memory usage) with dynamic thresholds powered by Site24x7's Zia. These thresholds can be adjusted automatically based on historical data and real-time conditions, making alerts more accurate and less prone to false positives.
• Multichannel alerts: : Alerts can be sent via various channels, such as email, SMS, mobile apps, and integrations with incident management tools like PagerDuty or ServiceNow. This ensures that the appropriate team members are quickly notified.
• Alert escalation and incident tracking: : The Zylker team can set up escalation policies to ensure critical alerts are resolved promptly. The team can also track incidents to closure and measure the mean time to resolution.