Observability is the most important capability needed to manage the development, deployment, and operation of modern systems. These slides—based on the webinar with EMA Research and LightStep--explore the importance of observability and how to address this capability for complex systems.

1. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Why Modern Systems Require a
New Approach to Observability
Steve Hendrick
Research Director
Enterprise Management Associates
Daniel “Spoons” Spoonhower
CTO and Cofounder
Lightstep

2. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Watch the On-Demand Webinar
Slide 2
• Why Modern Systems Require a New Approach to Observability
On-Demand Webinar: https://info.enterprisemanagement.com/why-
modern-systems-require-a-new-approach-to-observability-webinar-ws
• Check out upcoming webinars from EMA here:
http://www.enterprisemanagement.com/freeResearch

3. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Featured Speakers
Steve Hendrick, Research Director, EMA
Steve has over 20 years of experience as an industry analyst and 10 years of experience
across a variety of application development roles. He specializes in application
development and deployment topics, including DevOps, lifecycle management,
application platforms, decision analytics, middleware, and the broad spectrum of tools
and technologies that support professional developers and IT managers.
Daniel “Spoons” Spoonhower, CTO and Cofounder, Lightstep
Spoons is a co-founder at Lightstep, where he builds performance management tools for
deep software systems. Previously, Spoons spent almost six years at Google where he
worked on developer tools as part of both Google’s internal infrastructure and Cloud
Platform teams. He has published papers on the performance of parallel programs,
garbage collection, and real-time programming. He has a PhD in programming languages
from Carnegie Mellon University but still hasn’t found one he loves.
Slide 3 © 2020 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

4. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
How Application Development is Changing
Key Tenets of Modern Application Development
Slide 4 © 2020 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
InnovationCloud Native Computing
Continuous
ImprovementAbstraction DecompositionSoC
Microservices OSS APIs
Modern Application Development
Manageability
VelocityPolicy
Observability
Governance
Data
Other
Deep System Orchestration
Data
Variety Volume
AI & ML

5. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTINGSlide 5 © 2020 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
The Changing Focus of Application Development
Every company becomes a software company
21%
40%
39%
37%
27%
35%
We develop custom applications to support our internal
informational needs only
We develop a moderate number of custom apps to support
internal info needs as well as transacting with
customers/partners
We develop many custom applications that impact nearly
every activity in our enterprise
What response best describes your enterprises’ approach to app dev?
2019 Q3 2018 Q2
DevOps 2021 Survey, September 2019, N=400
-43%
+48%
+11%
Change Over
5 Quarters

6. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Top Three DevOps Objectives
3%
18%
13%
25%
14%
16%
13%
7%
10%
14%
18%
22%
29%
Other
Improve the performance of applications
Improve IT productivity and reduce cost
Improve our agility in addressing changing market
needs
Improve the customer experience
Improve the speed of software delivery
Improve the quality and reliability of applications
What are the top three objectives that your enterprise wants to accomplish through
DevOps?
2019 Q3
2018 Q2
DevOps 2021 Survey, September 2019, N=400
DevOps 2020 Survey, June 2018, N=420
Slide 6 © 2020 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

7. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Reasons for Using Operational Analytic Tools
DevOps 2021 Survey, September 2019, N=377
49%
47%
46%
45%
45%
35%
35%
35%
34%
33%
33%
31%
30%
2%
It helps us avoid hardware and software failures
It helps us improve performance
It helps us improve quality
It helps us eliminate delays
It helps us improve staff productivity
It helps us reduce cost
It helps us know where our value chain can be improved
It helps how we design/develop/deploy/operate products
It provides visibility into the operation of our infra hardware
It provides visibility into the ops of our software processes
It is a necessary step in moving us to the use of AI and ML
It enables us to better support customer needs
It provides a single unified view of our machine data
Don’t know or not sure
Percentage valid cases of current or planned OA tool users
Why does your enterprise use or plan to use operational analytic tools?
Slide 7 © 2020 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

8. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Projected DevOps Growth by Market Segment
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
AnnualGrowth
DevOps Growth by DevOps Market Segment
Growth 2021
Growth 2020
DevOps 2021 Survey, September 2019, N=400
Slide 8 © 2020 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

9. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
How Application Development is Changing
• How has IT responded?
• DevOps practices
• Microservices
• More managed services
• Accelerate delivery by decoupling...
• Services
• Deployments
• Teams
Slide 9 © 2020 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

10. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
The Implications of App Dev Changes
• Understanding microservice behavior is complex
… and you’ve handed that responsibility to every DevOps team
• Many independently changing aspects
• Dependencies
• Ephemeral services
• Asymmetric scalability
• Challenges in leveraging telemetry?
Slide 10 © 2020 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

11. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Lightstep and Observability
• What does Lightstep mean when you say observability?
• It’s the intersection of comprehensive telemetry, analytics, and policy to solve
problems and create a better user experience
• Concretely, it enables teams to detect and resolve regressions quickly,
regardless of system scale or complexity
• How should observability be approached to drive value?
• Unify telemetry (logs, metrics, traces)
• Collect all the data but filter intelligently
• Leverage the OpenTelemetry* API
• Telemetry should be addressed during development
• Integrate into existing workflows to accelerate/automate responses
Slide 11 © 2020 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
*OpenTelemetry is a CNCF Sandbox Project

12. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Lightstep and Observability
• The mechanics of how Lightstep collects telemetry data
• The important of open source and APIs
• Efficient techniques for data collection: network, compute, storage
• SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs
• Building context and automated feedback
• The mechanics of how Lightstep leverages telemetry data
• Operational issues that Lightstep addresses
• ML capabilities
• What constitutes an anomaly?
• RCA, policy, and issue resolution
• Lightstep benefits
• Accelerate resolution while controlling costs
Slide 12 © 2020 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

13. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Recommendations for Driving Observability
• Adopt tools that can support the complexity of deep systems
• Tools that take unified and nonhierarchical approaches to data
collection
• Tools that put Golden Signals and end user performance in context
• Tools selected must support real-time analysis (support shift right)
• Select tools that shift left and drive developer value
• Observability tools must be easy to implement
• And must provide incremental value
• Seek out tools that continually adjust SLOs in supervised and
unsupervised ways
Slide 13 © 2020 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

14. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
What is Your Observability Readiness?
• How important is microservice development going forward?
• Do your current operational analytic tools support deep system data
collection and analytics?
• How complete is your observability solution?
• Are you leveraging ML capabilities for ongoing analytic optimization?
• How cost effective is your current observability solution?
Slide 14 © 2020 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

15. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Observability Conclusions
Key Tenets of Operational Analytics in Modern Application Development
Slide 15 © 2020 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
InnovationCloud Native Computing
Continuous
ImprovementAbstraction DecompositionSoC
Microservices OSS APIs
Modern Application Development
Manageability
VelocityPolicy
Observability
Governance
Data
Other
Deep System Orchestration
Data
Variety Volume
AI & ML

16. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Q&A – Log Your Questions in the Q&A Panel
Try Lightstep’s interactive sandbox where you can debug an iOS error or
resolve a performance regression in less than 10 minutes.
Go to: https://lightstep.com/play/
© 2020 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.Slide 16