Develop an Observability Strategy
If you're responsible for monitoring integrations, consider developing an observability strategy so that you can meet your business objectives while streamlining your monitoring work.
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Why You Need an Observability Strategy
Your options for observability are numerous. But how do you plan your monitoring work so that you find issues as early as possible while still allowing you time to complete your other responsibilities? And how do you ensure that everyone in your organization is in agreement about your approach to monitoring?
The answer is to create an observability strategy. An observability ensures that your organization discovers any issues with its business processes in a timely manner.
When creating an observability strategy, consider your work, including:
- The tasks that you perform daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly.
- The time when you perform the tasks.
- The person who performs the task.
- The reason you perform the tasks.
- The stakeholders to notify in the event of an issue, and when they should be notified.
- The steps you take to determine the source of an issue.
- The steps you take to resolve an issue.
Tasks to Include
Monitoring tasks typically fall into one of the following categories:
- Tasks you complete before an integration goes live.
- Daily monitoring tasks to make sure everything is running as expected.
- Occasional tasks to ensure operational excellence.
For a collection of suggested tasks to potentially include in your observability strategy, see Workflow for Monitoring Integrations.
Factors to Consider
Consider an organization with business-critical integrations that run daily at 10 AM and 4 PM. You might choose to actively monitor these integrations at those times. For other integrations, you might rely upon an hourly notification email or periodic reviews of the Observability pages to inform you of issues.
When planning your observability strategy, consider your business requirements, including:
- Which integrations are critical to my organization?
- How soon do we need to know about issues that impact our critical integrations? What about less critical integrations?
- What are the business impacts if we don't addresss the issues in a timely manner?
- How often do we need to check in to make sure everything is running as expected?
People Are Just as Important as Tasks
Don't forget the critical step of getting stakeholders involved early in the planning of the observability strategy. Getting all stakeholders to contribute to and agree to an observability strategy is sometimes a challenging task. However, consensus on the strategy contributes to a stronger strategy that is likely to meet your organization's monitoring requirements.
Sample Observability Strategy
An observability strategy doesn't need to be lengthy to be effective. For example, consider the following simple plan as a starting place for your organization.
| Time | Task | Owner | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
|
9:00 AM |
Start-of-day status check |
Arya Backups: Melissa, Mark |
Review the hourly notification emails that came in overnight or the Observability pages and determine the following information:
|
|
10:00 AM |
Business-critical monitoring Monitor the business-critical Order Processing integration |
Rajan Backups: Arya, Sneha |
This integration runs twice every weekday. Review the hourly notification email or the Observability pages and determine the following information:
|
|
11:00 AM |
Hourly connectivity agent check |
Arya Backups: Melissa, Mark |
Determine whether all connectivity agents are up and running. |
|
12:00 PM |
Hourly connectivity agent check |
Arya Backups: Melissa, Mark |
Determine whether all connectivity agents are up and running. |
|
1:00 PM |
Midday status check and integration count check |
Arya Backups: Melissa, Mark |
Review the hourly notification email or the Observability pages and determine the following information:
|
|
2:00 PM |
Hourly connectivity agent check |
Arya Backups: Melissa, Mark |
Determine whether all connectivity agents are up and running. |
|
3:00 PM |
Hourly connectivity agent check |
Arya Backups: Melissa, Mark |
Determine whether all connectivity agents are up and running. |
|
4:00 PM |
Business-critical monitoring Monitor the business-critical Order Processing integration |
Rajan Backups: Arya, Sneha |
This integration runs twice every weekday. Review the hourly notification email or the
Observability pages and determine the following
information:
|
|
5:00 PM |
End-of-day status check and integration count check |
Arya Backups: Melissa, Mark |
Review the hourly notification email or the Observability pages and determine the following information:
|