Top 7 Observability Tools for a Rapid Digital Transformation

Developers worldwide are adopting a microservices architecture to deploy their applications across distributed environments. The need for a comprehensive observability solution has naturally become more significant with the rise of distributed app architecture. Tracking and troubleshooting the components within the environment is challenging, though. Organizations need visibility into these components to understand their application behavior. 

And that is where observability tools come into action. But before going deeper into observability tools, let’s understand what observability is. It’s a methodology to observe and regulate the systems autonomously. Organizations are gradually opting for polyglot microservices to reduce cloud complexities and enhance the productivity of their developers. 

At the same time, several new observability tools are entering the market every day. Therefore, finding the right tool becomes a challenge in itself.

Observability Tools You Should Look for

Observability tools are exclusively designed to observe systems and applications via different utility logs and monitors. They facilitate an organization to receive real-time feedback and insights right from their systems. This approach offers actionable data to companies faster than any other monitoring tool.   

The observability tools market is continuously evolving. As per Statista, the combined market for observability and security analytics is likely to reach around $28.26 billion by 2024. Thus, the variety of choices can become overwhelming. We’ve collected a few excellent tools, which are as follows :

1. Honeycomb

Honeycomb provides users with insights into their app’s performance. Query history, social debugging, metrics, structured logs, etc., are some of the features offered by Honeycomb. Furthermore, it offers a flexible data model that allows users to instrument codes without worrying about data structures.

In addition, Honeycomb lets the users identify and track business events at any time. Furthermore, it comes with a powerful user interface and a straightforward pricing structure.  

2. LogicMonitor

LogicMonitor is a SaaS-enabled solution that provides enhanced observability of applications, networks, servers, websites, and other infrastructural elements. It is well-known for cloud service monitoring, advanced alerting, and focused thresholds. 

LogicMonitor can easily detect anomalies within the usage trends and notifies your development team accordingly. Apart from this, it leverages the power of AIOps to present actionable insights into your solution. Furthermore, it uses data usage and alert forecasting to reduce unnecessary clutter and ensure a reliable experience. 

3. Dynatrace

Dynatrace addresses a large number of monitoring services for large-size organizations. Moreover, it uses an AI-based engine known as Davis for root cause analysis and automated anomaly detection. As a result, Dynatrace has become the most popular choice for larger organizations looking to track complex infrastructure and detect vulnerabilities.

Apart from this, Dynatrace offers a distinct solution for monitoring infrastructure, cloud automation, and application security. However, the pricing structure depends on the type you choose for your enterprise. Therefore, you should make a suitable choice after analyzing your requirements. 

4. Grafana Labs

Grafana Labs is a prominent interactive visualization web layer and open-source analytics. It supports different storage backends for time-series data. The good thing about Grafana Labs is that it can be easily connected to various data sources like InfluxDB, Graphite, ElasticSearch, Zipkin, Tempo, Jaeger, Prometheus, etc.       

In addition, Grafana Labs offers alerts, dashboards, plugins, and multiple user-level governance access as an observability tool. It contains two versions of services which are as follows: 

• Grafana Cloud: You can easily send personalized data to the Grafana cloud dashboards. Also, it offers various other types of solutions like Grafana Cloud Traces, Grafana Cloud Logs, and Grafana Cloud Metrics. 

• Grafana Enterprise Stack: This stack provides robust support for logs and metrics with Grafana installed into your system infrastructure. Besides, it comes with expert support as well.

5. New Relic

New Relic is designed to improve the entire repair process, eliminate unplanned downtime, boost productivity, and enable software developers to concentrate on making app performance effective and seamless. Also, it is easy to set up and provides live analytics to assist programmers in troubleshooting their app issues. 

Even New Relic is flexible enough to provide development teams with guidelines regarding response suggestions. In addition, it offers a variety of pricing plans and a free plan as well. Overall, New Relic’s infrastructure and app monitoring stand out from the rest because of their efficiency.

6. Lightstep

Lightstep is a powerful observability solution intended to monitor the health of cloud-native applications and respond to changes in real-time. One of the attractive features of Lightstep is its excellent distributed tracing support. Other than this, it provides a praiseworthy metrics database.

Lightstep uses OpenTelemetry for instrumentation. It is beneficial to generate and send telemetry data to what is known as Lightstep Microsatellites. The microsatellites fetch and pass data to Lightstep SaaS for the purpose of analytics. Also, it contains a time-series database to store the telemetry data.

Lightstep offers Teams and Enterprise editions and a free-of-cost version regarding the service plans.

7. SigNoz

SigNoz is a full-stack and open-source observability and APM tool. It collects both traces and metrics with log management in the product roadmap. As SigNoz is an open-source solution, you do not get stuck with just a single SaaS vendor. Moreover, you don’t need to send your data to a third-party vendor when you are using SigNoz.

Apart from this, SigNoz facilitates a full-stack observability stack for a microservice application. Here are some more features offered by SigNoz -

• Storage backend to save a humongous amount of telemetry data.
• Visualization layer for engineering teams and takes actions.
• Generation of telemetry metrics, traces, and logs.         

SigNoz uses OpenTelemetry, which is a project under Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It is gradually becoming an industry standard to build telemetry data.     

In a Nutshell

Observability tools have become crucial for eliminating operational challenges efficiently. It is almost impossible for engineering teams to troubleshoot bugs and assess the overall app performance without observability. Hence choosing the right observability tool is imperative.

Preserving on-point observability in your software solutions is inevitable to stay ahead of your competitors in the current tech market. And a good observability tool can help you achieve this goal. However, choosing a suitable tool can be challenging as many players are in this segment. Here we have discussed the best observability tools to help you find the right one for your enterprise.