As the world has evolved and more software applications are being used to run businesses at every level, application observability solutions have become essential for many companies to optimise their operations. Application observability refers to the end-to-end understanding of application health across a software environment to prevent application downtime, including detection, alerting, incident management, root cause analysis, impact analysis and resolution of application downtime. Without effective application observability, software operation teams can be left unable to prevent and resolve outages, leading to huge losses in customer trust and millions in losses from downtime.
Data observability is emerging as the next evolution in business data reliability. This form of observability involves automated monitoring across data pipelines and insights into data health, helping data teams to not only detect and alert out-of-the-ordinary situations but also to identify root causes of these issues and to act upon these quickly. This can help to reduce data downtime and errors, leading to increased efficiency and customer trust. Data observability focuses on five key pillars: accuracy, latency, consistency, scalability and compliance.
Unity Technologies is a gaming software company that found out the hard way the importance of data observability. In May 2022, Unity Technologies lost $110 million when a data downtime incident caused its advertising monetization tool to stop working. After this, their stock plunged by 36%, which is an example of how much business data reliability matters these days.
Jarret Rivas is a software engineer who has seen firsthand the importance of observability solutions in ensuring the reliability of software applications. His experience has taught him that with more visibility comes more trust, and with more trust comes happier customers. He believes that with the growing importance of ML and security, the same sense of urgency around observability will continue to grow for other areas of tech.
