Cloud-Native Observability: The Many-Faceted Benefits of Structured and Unified Logging—A Multi-Case Study

Abstract

Background: Cloud-native software systems often have a much more decentralized structure and many independently deployable and (horizontally) scalable components, making it more complicated to create a shared and consolidated picture of the overall decentralized system state. Today, observability is often understood as a triad of collecting and processing metrics, distributed tracing data, and logging. The result is often a complex observability system composed of three stovepipes whose data are difficult to correlate. Objective: This study analyzes whether these three historically emerged observability stovepipes of logs, metrics and distributed traces could be handled in a more integrated way and with a more straightforward instrumentation approach. Method: This study applied an action research methodology used mainly in industry–academia collaboration and common in software engineering. The research design utilized iterative action research cycles, including one long-term use case. Results: This study presents a unified logging library for Python and a unified logging architecture that uses the structured logging approach. The evaluation shows that several thousand events per minute are easily processable. Conclusions: The results indicate that a unification of the current observability triad is possible without the necessity to develop utterly new toolchains.

Cost-Profiling Microservice Applications Using an APM Stack

“…These requirements are used in the following to decide on an open-source APM stack to adopt and for the design of our CPT solution. Integrated in a complete observability environment instead of being offered as a stand-alone cost-profiling tool NFR 4 Able to scale with demand as the number and complexity of the monitored applications grows NFR 5 Designed with fault tolerance and high availability in mind NFR 6 Offered as an open-source solution Technical TR 1 Integrated context view should be offered, allowing for switching between different data views seamlessly TR 2 The solution should act as a single source of truth for all monitoring data of the target application TR 3 Data presentation should focus on usability, preferring a single page view for fast exploration…”

“…In this environment, there is an imperative need to possess the ability to observe both how microservices as complex distributed systems behave and how they interact with their underlying infrastructure [3]. Observability, a measure of how well a system's internal state can be inferred by its external outputs, is a concept coming from dynamical systems that has been widely adopted in microservice architectures for this purpose [4]. Achieving observability is challenging on multiple levels [5].…”

Scalability Benchmarking of Cloud-Native Applications Applied to Event-Driven Microservices

“…Prometheus Prometheus [Pro22] is a tool for cloud-native observability [Kra22], which is widely used in production [Clo22]. It continuously requests metrics data from so-called exporters and stores them in a time series database.…”