Monitoring, metrics, and data points - they are now the echo of the past. Modern applications demand a modern approach to reliability and observability, and only Observability 2.0 can fulfill these needs. See why traditional monitoring is now dead and what we key players use instead.
Don’t Make Me Think
Don't Make Me Think (a famous book by Steve Krug) explains that a good software program should let users accomplish their intended tasks as easily and directly as possible. It was originally published nearly 25 years ago, and yet applications still don’t understand that the users and developers don’t need data. They need answers and solutions instead. Monitoring solutions, including the biggest ones like Datadog, New Relic, Appdynamics, or Dynatrace, make all the same mistakes.
Typical monitoring solutions focus on bringing data and presenting it to the user in the easiest possible way. They integrate automatically with various sources (like OS-level, JVM, network, and clouds), and automatically bring all the metrics they can get. They excel at presenting the charts and showing millions of data points nicely and concisely.
While being great at capturing and presenting data, monitoring solutions completely miss the point. Developers don’t need data. They need answers and solutions instead.
Standing on the shoulders of giants is not about doing the same things as others did but better. It’s about using the understanding gained by others to do even bigger things. When talking about monitoring, developers want explanations of what happens in their systems and how to make it better. They want solutions and automated reasoning instead of data points and fancy charts.
Unfortunately, current monitoring solutions focus on the data instead of the solutions. For instance, New Relic explicitly asks the developers to read the logs:
The thing is, developers don’t want to read logs. Why would they? Why does New Relic want to make developers think instead of giving them the answers?
Similarly, Dynatrace introduces AI to let developers find more metrics to browse
Again, developers don’t want to browse metrics. They want the monitoring solutions to do that for them and give the answers instead. Why does Dynatrace bring more data instead of bringing answers?
The world is now complex and fast-paced. Developers build and deploy hundreds of applications, and they don’t want to waste time on browsing logs or reading metrics. They want Observability 2.0 instead.
Observability 2.0 to the Rescue
Modern observability solutions focus on fixing the problems instead of on finding them. They do it across the whole SDLC and with data points from every step of the software lifecycle pipelines. Let’s see how Metis achieves that in the world of database observability.
First, developers need to optimize their databases. Metis finds slow queries, analyzes them, and shows how to make them faster.
Similarly, Metis analyzes database schemas, indexes, configurations, and extensions to find improvements. Metis gives actionable solutions instead of raw metrics.
Last but not least, Metis monitors all the database activity and detects anomalies or performance issues. Instead of showing the data points, Metis troubleshoots automatically and provides solutions.
This way, developers immediately know how to fix the issues to make their systems better. Observability 2.0 is not about bringing the data. It’s about giving the solutions.
Stop Using Monitoring. Use Observability 2.0
All big monitoring solutions are wrong. They overfocus on bringing the data. They are great at extracting thousands of infrastructure metrics about your CPU, network, memory, and garbage collector. However, they swamp you with data points instead of giving you answers.
Instead, modern observability solutions focus on delivering actionable insights and automated solutions. They show how to make queries faster, schemas better, and how to improve the configuration to achieve higher performance. Observability is about automated understanding and actionable solutions.
Stop using monitoring. Move to observability 2.0 and get your issues fixed automatically. Today’s fast-paced world with hundreds of deployments each day won’t get any easier. There is no point in wasting time reading logs or browsing through the metrics. We deserve the tools that bring answers to achieve the highest database reliability and performance automatically.
