Ian Thompson

Ending up with or having too many tools for monitoring is an age-old problem in the monitoring space. It has been around for decades. In fact I would go a step further and argue that it is much worse within the platforms of today then it was in days gone by. There is a direct correlation between the explosion of new, exciting and innovative technologies and services in modern platform development of today and the sheer volume of tooling you can easily end up with to monitor it. In this blog I explore what has driven the expansion of tools, how having too many is creating fundamental challenges in how these platforms are being managed, the negative impact that this has on innovation and, most importantly, what the solution is.

Leveraging custom metrics and having complete control into how all metrics are collected and are sent into your O11y platform, is key to managing the complex modern platforms of today (and those of tomorrow!). Read more on the blog.

We have all been there. When you are trying to buy a ticket and the app crashes or loads the next web page when booking a holiday only to find it takes forever and appears to hang. Our frustration level increases and if it continues, we will exit and go elsewhere. With banking apps though, we won’t move straight away but repeated bad experiences here will be remembered and eventually will make us move.

Traditional monitoring approaches struggle in digital platforms and they do not collect the rich data contained in the logs. Observability, with OpenTelemetry, is the key to managing these platforms and it is based on the capture and analysis of three types of telemetry; metrics, traces and logs.

In this blog, we will take a look into why modern digital platforms drove this need for OTel and how combining this with Splunk’s o11y platform solves the key challenges of managing these platforms today.