How to Monitor Your Hybrid Applications Without Toil

About seventy-two percent of businesses operate in a hybrid IT environment, mixing their cloud-based services with traditional on-premises infrastructure. These hybrid environments offer many benefits, from scale, speed, and flexibility to security, cost savings, and control, blending the best of both worlds. However, teams are also finding that within these hybrid environments they’re struggling to get a clear picture of how all the pieces fit together, which is critical for efficient troubleshooting and reducing MTTR. With systems and services spread out across complex architectures and clusters of teams and tools that don’t effectively speak to each other, engineering teams find it difficult to effectively monitor these hybrid environments. Investigations can be disconnected, cumbersome experiences that result in costly slowness and outages. 

Avoiding the Hybrid Chasm

To realize the full potential of a hybrid environment and avoid the pitfalls, engineering teams need a simple, unified solution that can monitor an on-premises environment just as well as it can a cloud environment. They need comprehensive visibility and data alignment from one environment to the next. This solution also needs to be quick enough to capture ephemeral cloud telemetry data in fine detail so no change or problem is missed. This is a tall ask for an observability solution. Too tall for many, but Splunk’s solution comes in at just the right altitude. 

A Bridge Over Long MTTRs

Splunks solution bridges the hybrid gap by providing visibility to on-premises and cloud applications, down to the line of code, out of the box. Prebuilt dashboards and automatic detectors and alerts capture and spotlight issues anywhere in your environment, and the real-time streaming architecture means this is happening as soon as data starts flowing into the platform — almost instantly. Topology and service maps (unified across all the places where your applications are running) and directed troubleshooting guides users to root cause, and, if you’re already using Splunk for log analytics, you can visualize these best-in-class logs side-by-side with your metrics and traces to quickly get to a resolution when an issue occurs. 

If these challenges sound all too real to you, and you’re curious about just how Splunk can deliver these capabilities, this series is for you. Follow along as we walk you through how to:

• Set up monitoring for your hybrid environment
• Customize detectors and alerts
• Investigate failure events with logs in context

Speak the Language

Some key concepts, some unique to Splunk, that you’ll come across in this series include:

• AutoDetect Alerts and Detectors: Alerts and detectors, created based on best practices, that are automatically created in Splunk Observability Cloud when you have supported integrations configured.
  • A detector contains the logic, thresholds, and message details to monitor for. When the configured conditions are met. 
  • An Alert is generated from the detector when alert conditions are met, which is the actual notification that gets generated and sent out.
• Dashboard: Dashboards are groupings of charts and visualizations of metrics. 
• Log Observer Connect: An integration that allows you to query your Splunk Enterprise or Splunk Cloud Platform logs using the capabilities of Splunk Log Observer and Related Content in Splunk Observability Cloud.
• Metrics Time Series (MTS): A metric time series (MTS) contains all the data points that have the same metric name, metric type, and set of dimensions. Observability Cloud automatically creates MTS from incoming data points.
• Navigator: A collection of resources that lets you monitor metrics and logs across various instances of your services. Resources in a navigator include a full list of entities, dashboards, related alerts and detectors, and service dependencies.

Get started with How To Set Up Monitoring for Your Hybrid Environment >