It almost sounds like a support joke: What's the fastest way to resolve an incident report? Easy!
Don't have one in the first place! OK, maybe it's kinda silly, but there's some truth behind it. Let me explain. Traditional
problem resolution follows a well-known sequence: First there's a problem, which is reported as an incident, and then with a bit of luck, it's resolved.
For example, a problem might be something like a service failing due to a bug or resource constraint. An incident
report is created when a user complains an application isn't working. The sequence ends when
the incident report is finally closed. For SREs, the elapsed time from start to finish is known as MTTR -- or mean-time-to-repair.
But MTTR is all about repairing software after incidents are reported. Returning to my joke, what
if we could predict problems before they occurred? No more app or service failure! That would mean
no incident to report and no scrambling to resolution. The problem with the traditional
approach to incident management is that it relies on react- and-repair strategy. A better way is to
predict. That way with a heads up, you're better positioned to prevent. But what exactly does that
mean? Well, for years, software repair focused on manual remediation. That was the case for apps,
tools, libraries, and so on. This work is time consuming and involves a mouthful of benchmarks to hit.
For example, metrics like the mean-time-to-detect, acknowledge, identify, fix, and validate.
A smarter approach is proactive. It uses Artificial Intelligence,
Machine Learning, and AIOps to shift the focus away from repair and toward prevention.
New metrics come into play, namely MTTP and MTTN. They correspond to mean-time-to-
prevent and mean-time-to-notify. So how does this work?
One word: Observability.
That's what drives the monitoring and analysis of applications, services, and resources. That is,
they are "observable" by support platforms. Let me give you a one-line definition of observability:
Observable systems provide telemetry data about their activity so others can
monitor them and help with diagnosis, if problems arise. Now, taking a step back,
there are two primary sources of IT problems that create headaches: operational and functional.
Both categories required trained staff. And let's be honest, they're potentially
overburdened or under- skilled. Operational issues occur when there are application components that are working,
but an infrastructure problem is dragging down performance. For example, things like insufficient
CPU, memory, storage, and network bandwidth. Then there's functional issues. That's stuff like bugs,
authentication failures, and deployment problems. A functional issue may start with one service, but
because of interdependences, failures can quickly cascade across the entire application transaction
path. But whether they're operational or functional, these problems can become particularly complex in
cloud-native or hybrid cloud environment. This is doubly true if your organization is weighed
down by technical debt or legacy applications and infrastructure. But an observability platform that
supports precise, automated operational and functional software remediation, cuts through
the noise and delivers end-to-end visibility. This means you can stop reacting and start preventing.
Of course, there are many observability platforms. When evaluating which is the best fit for your
organization, look for these "must haves". I'll put them in three broad categories -- Problems,
Remediation, and Visibility. To weigh your options, ask yourself these questions:
Does it help prevent problems by handling them before they are reported as incidents?
Does it help with fast remediation by notifying you when needed and without "noise"?
And does it provide end-to-end visibilityby identifying patterns and anticipating problems?
The Instana Enterprise Observability Platform delivers all this and more.
The payoff? Your developers will spend more time writing and optimizing code -- and less time
troubleshooting incident reports. To learn more, check out the links below.