Transitioning to Modern Observability

Exposing the system layers and creating a systematic way of monitoring to provide visibility of the application and infrastructure health and performance will ensure the availability, reliability, and stability of services. During scaling up a startup company and shifting from monolithic distributed applications and services, software architecture changes, and the need for gaining actionable insights into the application performance, debugging, and troubleshooting will require an overhaul to adopt these changes. The topology for the infrastructure setup changes from managing and serving traffic from a few servers to hundreds of servers on multiple cloud providers, as a single cluster to a multi-cluster, multi-environment setup. When scaling an organization, the systems also need to adopt the microservice architecture to manage the distributed components and increase developers’ productivity. Besides, the impact of infrastructures managed by external parties needs to be monitored due to system dependency and integration. This master’s thesis project aims to create a system to manage logs and implement a monitoring system. The company I work for uses a database to write application logs and an internally built tool to monitor the performance and the health of the applications or products. It operates quite moderately until the application architecture started to change and the user base grew quite fast. Furthermore, monitoring became a necessity as the company’s infrastructure and service started to scale out. The thesis also explains why the adaptation of observability for use in production software systems is necessary to understand software applications and infrastructure’s internal state besides user expectation shift and emerging tools to improve service reliability. The results presented in this thesis demonstrate that the custom solution for creating a system-wide monitoring solution provides numerous benefits, such as centralized log management and application observability