What is full-stack observability?

Full-stack observability is a monitoring technology that provides IT teams with complete visibility across all of an application’s components, dependencies and performance metrics. This is in stark contrast with traditional monitoring tools which only allow IT teams to react to incidents after the damage has been done. Full stack is unique in that it allows IT teams to track and diagnose problems on the front end and solve them in the backend without interfering with business.

The primary functions of full stack can be broken up into three categories

Security: Identifying and fortifying vulnerabilities across networks.

Performance: Monitoring applications, both hybrid and cloud native.

Optimization: Lowering overall cost by increasing asset utilization and optimizing resource allocation.

Full-stack observability will provide its user a holistic view into active systems and let them improve its performance and health.

It is incredibly difficult to accurately predict how much of what a network will need and when, especially in markets that fluctuate seasonally. Full stack has provided InfraOps teams with a toolkit that allows them to minimize infrastructure costs while maximizing performance. Teams that have adopted full-stack observability tools are able to model what-if scenarios, forecast capacity and allocate resources in real time. Using this tool, teams can bring together telemetry data as they do business and apply these insights across IT.

With many organizations moving to cloud environments, the market for different monitoring solutions has grown, this has caused what market experts have dubbed the ‘monitoring tool sprawl.’ The problem comes in that traditional monitoring tools are not built for observability, and with an increase in availability, many organizations find themselves managing a glut of monitoring tools. This makes monitoring needlessly complex, delaying resolution and increasing costs.

The singularity of full stack observability is its strength. Acting as the paramount source of data, full stack can eliminate confusion between teams and work to strengthen collaboration between them.


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