A Beginner’s Guide to

Observability
Seeing everything, everywhere, all at once —
and why it matters
In many ways, your organization is similar to a bustling city — complex,
growing, and full of moving parts. It’s a metropolis of microservices,
cloud providers, serverless functions, and third-party APIs. While it may
be thriving, chaos could be lurking in the shadows and threatening to
upend your success. At any moment, unexpected performance issues
or downtime could spell disaster for your business. A critical app could
crash, your website could slow to a crawl, or worse — your website
could go completely dark during your busiest time of year. In the event
of a disaster like this, alarms are blaring, customers are complaining,
and your team is scrambling to find answers. You need a hero. That
hero is observability.

Swooping in to save the day, observability doesn’t wear a cape, but it

might as well. It illuminates real-time data including logs, metrics, and
traces from dark corners of your vast digital ecosystem to help you
investigate. It helps you pinpoint the source of the chaos, whether it’s
a rogue microservice or misbehaving API, and resolve issues before
things spiral out of control. And it doesn’t stop there — it watches after
your organization to make sure you’re ready for whatever comes next.

Good news: You don’t need to sit around and wait for a disaster before
observability can leap into action. In this guide, you’ll learn what
observability is, how it works, and how your organization can harness
its power. We’ll share real-world examples, tips, and what to look for in
an observability solution.

A Beginner’s Guide to Observability | Splunk 2

Everyone — from developers What is
to product managers to customer
support teams and even executives — observability?
can benefit from the observability Observability is the ability to ask and answer any question about
your business or application at any time, no matter how complex your
mindset. It’s not exclusive to site
infrastructure. It also covers you in the case of unknown unknowns, where
reliability engineers or DevOps teams. you’re not actively asking questions. The process includes instrumenting
systems and applications to collect data such as metrics, traces, and
It empowers your entire organization logs, then sending this data to a system that can analyze and provide
to work smarter, move faster, and actionable insights. While monitoring is an important part of observability,
observability is more than monitoring. Instead of passively tracking
innovate confidently. predefined metrics to alert you when something is wrong, observability
actively helps you uncover root causes by analyzing the internal state of
your systems. It’s like having X-ray vision for your digital infrastructure.

In the event that something does go wrong, like a checkout page failing
during the biggest sales day of the year, your team won’t be stuck
struggling to connect the dots and watching helplessly as customers
abandon their carts. With observability, you can detect a problem or
slowdown before it impacts your customers, look at the right log to identify
the source of the issue, and resolve the problem within minutes — before
customers ever even notice.

Observability is a mindset that grows and evolves over time — it isn’t just
a tool or a feature you can plug in overnight. A big part of it is designing
simple systems that your team can easily understand, troubleshoot, and
improve. By building applications with instrumentation baked in from the
ground up, you can solve problems quickly and efficiently.

In a world where complexity is inevitable and downtime is not an option,

observability is your organization’s superhero.

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Why observability?
Observability enables you to reduce time spent firefighting to seize
innovation opportunities. It ensures you’re not just reacting to problems,
but driving lasting improvements. A mindset shift from monitoring to
observability protects your team from painstakingly firefighting individual
issues. Instead, you’re empowered to optimize the system as a whole.

Ultimately, your business is only as strong as your ability to understand

and respond to problems. Observability helps you confidently and quickly
answer critical questions like:

• Why is my application running slower than usual?

• How is a particular system issue impacting customers directly? Are there
particular groups of customers who are affected more than others?
• What trends can I pinpoint to fuel future growth?

Competition is stiff in the tech world, and reactive troubleshooting simply

won’t cut it. You need observability to give you deep visibility into every
layer of your digital environment.

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Key benefits of observability
Observability drives success for your business, your tech, your • It boosts uptime and performance. Observability ensures teams
employees, and your customers. Here are some reasons why it’s can proactively address issues before they affect customers,
so transformative: leading to more reliable systems.

• It provides a comprehensive understanding of complex • It makes customers happier and increases revenue. Great
systems. Modern applications consist of dozens or hundreds of performance and minimal disruptions lead to better customer
microservices, serverless functions, and third-party integrations. satisfaction, retention, and ultimately, a healthier bottom line.
Observability helps untangle the complexity, offering a clear picture • It gives you a better understanding of your overall business, not
of how everything works together. just digital applications. As systems become more interconnected,
• It helps solve problems faster and reduce MTTR (mean time to tech and business leaders need real-time, actionable insights that
resolution). When something breaks, observability empowers connect performance to outcomes.
teams to quickly pinpoint root causes instead of wasting hours While seeing through walls and predicting the future may seem far-
sifting through logs or dashboards. fetched, observability is the next best thing — and organizations are
• It enables smarter planning for code releases and capacity. With reaping the benefits. Having a leading observability practice results
a clear view of system behavior, teams can better predict potential in fewer outages, faster problem-solving, and a stronger return on
issues and make informed decisions about scaling, resource investment, not to mention the peace of mind that your team can
allocation, and release timing. defeat any villain that comes their way.
• It guides more insightful incident reviews. Observability helps you
identify patterns and system behaviors, helping you learn more
from incidents and prevent future problems.

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Roadmap to
observability
So, how can you put the superpowers of observability
into practice at your organization? The core foundation of
observability is based on data, a reliable platform, AI and ML
capabilities, and insight into metrics and data sources.
Let’s explore.

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Key data types needed for effective observability
These specific types of data are fundamental for What are dimensions, and why do they matter? High cardinality is powerful because it allows you to ask highly
building an observability practice. Metrics alone don’t tell the full story — they need dimensions to specific questions of your data, such as:
provide context. Dimensions are attributes or labels that you attach
• What’s the average response time for premium users accessing the
Logs/events to metrics to add specificity and context. Think of them as the “who,”
app from mobile devices in the US East region?
“what,” and “where” that give your metrics meaning. For example, a
Logs/events are immutable records of discrete events
raw metric like “CPU usage” becomes significantly more actionable • How many failed transactions occurred for user IDs associated
that happen over time. Common event sources include:
when paired with dimensions like region (e.g., “us-east-1”), application with VIP customer accounts?
• System and server logs (syslog, journald) name (e.g., “checkout-service”), or instance ID (e.g., “i-123456789”).
High cardinality does have its challenges, like increased storage and
• Firewall and intrusion detection system logs computational overhead. That’s why observability platforms that
148150800 os.cpu.user 42.12345 hq:us-west-1
• Social media feeds (Twitter, etc.) excel in handling high-cardinality data stand apart — they allow
you to uncover critical insights without compromising performance
• Application, platform and server logs (log4j, log4net, Apache,
or usability.
MySQL, AWS) Timestamp Metric Name Value Dimensions
In summary, metrics tell you what’s happening, but dimensions
Metrics and dimensions and cardinality reveal why it’s happening and to whom it matters
By layering in dimensions, you can slice and dice your metrics to
most. They allow you to make data-driven decisions that improve
Metrics are numbers that describe a particular process or activity, answer precise questions, such as:
uptime, user experience, and revenue — and are essential to
measured over intervals of time. They provide the foundational data
• How is one specific user’s transaction performing? mastering observability.
you need to understand your systems, applications, and business
performance. Common sources of metrics include: • Are big spenders more affected by an outage than other customers?
• What’s the bounce rate for users in a particular geographic region?
Traces
• System metrics (CPU, memory, disk)
Specific parts of a user’s journey are collected into traces, showing
• Infrastructure metrics (AWS CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, Dimensions enable you to go beyond high-level averages and which services were invoked, which containers/hosts/instances
Kubernetes Metrics Server) unlock granular insights that directly tie system performance to they were running on, and what the results of each call were.
business outcomes.
• Web tracking scripts (Google Analytics, Digital Experience
Management) The role of cardinality
• Application agents/collectors (APM, error tracking) Understanding cardinality is key to making the most of dimensions.
Cardinality refers to the number of unique combinations of
• Business metrics (revenue, customer sign-ups, bounce rate,
dimensions and their values in your dataset. For example, if you track
cart abandonment)
metrics like “response time” and add dimensions like user ID, region,
and device type, the possible combinations (or cardinality) can
quickly grow into the thousands, millions, or even billions.

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Types of data sources
The following are types of data sources that have evolved over the • Control systems: vCenter, Kubernetes, etc.
years — all important in achieving observability: • Dev automation: Jenkins, Sonarcube, etc.
• Network flow data: router/switch counters, firewall logs, etc. • Infra orchestration: Chef, Puppet, Ansible, etc.
• Virtual servers: VM Logs, ESXi Logs, etc. • Signals from mobile devices: product adoption, users and clients,
• Cloud services: AWS data sources such as EC2, EMR, S3, etc. feature adoption, etc.

• Docker: logging driver, syslog, apps logs, container metrics, etc. • Metrics for business analytics: app data, HTTP events, SFA/CRM

• Containers and microservice architectures: container and • Signals from social sentiment analytics: analyzing tweets over time
microservices logs, container metrics and events, etc. • Customer experience analytics: app logs, business process logs,
• Third-party services: SaaS, FaaS, serverless, etc. call detail records, etc.
• Message buses and middleware

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Core capabilities of an observability platform
The good news is that so much data exists; the challenge is Add context • Enrich and add context to events to make them informative
aggregating and gaining insight from all of it. That’s where an Next, the platform needs to show the responding engineer what they and actionable
observability platform comes in — to facilitate shared learnings, need to fix the problem quickly and efficiently. They should be able • Speed and simplify investigations and workflows
enable collaborative incident response, support development to view data related to incidents in one click, keeping downtime to a • Make better decisions with deeper visibility and understanding
with data, and foster intelligent operations. But observability isn’t minimum. This context will also help them determine the effects of of the environment
about buying a shiny product and expecting instant success. It’s a code deployments on key metrics.
journey, requiring the right tools and the right approach to unlock
its full power. The rewards — like lightning-fast problem resolution, Get data in seamlessly
bulletproof reliability, and game-changing business outcomes —
Utilize AI and ML
OpenTelemetry (OTel) is the industry-standard way to collect
are well worth the effort. The data you need to answer questions about your business is and export telemetry data for observability. Backed by the Cloud
massive, and realistically, it’s a vast world that no human can Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and supported by a thriving
Look for a system that can do the following: realistically keep up with. That’s where AI assistants and large developer community, OTel simplifies how organizations gather
language models (LLMs) save the day, providing the superpowers traces, metrics, and logs across their systems. Its open, vendor-
Collect all data you need to make sense of it all. neutral framework ensures flexibility while avoiding lock-in.
Your observability platform needs to see across all stacks, The best observability systems use LLMs and machine learning (ML) What makes OpenTelemetry so compelling is its widespread
technologies, and environments. Think of this as the omniscience to get a handle on your past and present, giving you crystal-clear adoption and seamless integration with many popular open-
superpower. The platform should grant visibility into everything, insights into what’s going on with your services and applications. source tools and platforms. It’s designed to work across diverse
including cloud-native (containers, cloud, serverless), traditional They also help you look around the corner and predict what’s likely environments — whether you’re monitoring cloud services,
(self-hosted, on-premises, monoliths), and all languages and to happen next. By processing all that historical and real-time data, microservices, containers, or legacy systems — making it the easiest
frameworks you use. All of this data then needs to be aggregated these models dish out predictions, insights, and help you find root way to standardize and centralize your data collection.
and visible in one place. cause faster than ever.
By adopting OpenTelemetry, you’re aligning with the leading open-
With advances in AI, you can:
Analyze and de-duplicate source standard, future-proofing your observability practice, and
Your observability platform needs to be able to separate valuable • Reduce event clutter and false positives with multivariate tapping into a powerful ecosystem built to reduce complexity and
signals from the noise, like a superhero with enhanced perception. anomaly detection deliver better insights. It’s the simplest way to get your data in and
It should store statistics about your data at ingest time to get to make observability work for you.
• Automatically conceal duplicate events to focus on relevant ones
alerts and insights faster, and detect outliers or other anomalies and reducing alert storms
automatically. This will help your team identify problems at
• Easily sift through vast amounts of events by filtering, tagging
hyperspeed, zeroing in on what’s most important.
and sorting

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Employ essential tools Built for complexity Automate the routine, master the complex
Free your team from the burden of repetitive tasks by automating
There are many solutions that can help you get insights from the
Modern tech environments often feel like a labyrinth of complexity. the mundane. Your platform should not only save time but also
overwhelming volume of disparate data from all the sources listed
Microservices, containers, hyperscalers, and hybrid clouds orchestrate complex processes, helping you focus on what truly
above. You’ll likely find that you need the following tools to gain a full,
accelerate innovation but also make it harder to see what’s really matters — like driving your business forward.
end-to-end picture of your application:
going on. Without the right tools, it can be easy to feel lost.

Your observability solution should act as your guiding light, cutting

Tool Use through the fog and making sense of it all. It should be able to:

Infrastructure monitoring Determine the health and performance Monitor everything

of the hosts, containers, and overall Your observability platform should grant you crystal-clear visibility
environment your applications run on. into your entire ecosystem, no matter where your infrastructure
and applications live. It should pinpoint root causes, provide crucial
Application performance Investigate the behavior of your application context, and generate automated insights to catch problems before
monitoring at the service level. Determine where calls they snowball into disasters.
are going and how they perform.
Foster team collaboration
Real user monitoring Understand the experience of real users by Your observability solution should break down silos, ensuring that
collecting data from browsers about how every stakeholder has access to the data that matters. It should alert
your site performs and looks. Isolate issues the right people the first time and empower your team to act quickly
from the frontend or backend. and work together seamlessly.

Synthetic monitoring Measure the impact that releases, third-

party APIs and network issues have on the
performance and reliability of your app.

Logs Dig deeper into “the why behind the what”

when issues occur. Figure out how to
remediate the issues quickly.

Incident response Alert the right team the first time to fix
the issue and provide them with the data
they need to succeed in doing so, all in
one place.Reduce the risk of application
security exposure with real-time threat
detection and prevention.

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Why Splunk Observability Cloud?
Splunk Observability Cloud is the all-seeing superhero your business And when things inevitably go wrong, Splunk Observability helps
needs to realize the full potential of observability. With Splunk, you save the day. No more wading through endless logs. Now, you can
gain real-time, high-fidelity insights into your systems — no sampling, trace the issue back to its source in just a few clicks. Splunk takes
no blind spots. It’s like having laser vision that captures every critical this a step further by helping you see the real-world impact on your
data point, from user IDs to transactions, enabling you to uncover customers, providing insights into their actual experiences and
granular insights that make all the difference. Plus, it’s secure and recommending ways to enhance them.
scalable, so you can trust that your data is safe as you navigate the
Splunk Observability Cloud is built on OpenTelemetry, the industry
complexities of your digital universe.
standard for instrumentation, and Splunk is a major contributor
Splunk doesn’t just stop at tracking technical metrics — it’s a bridge to the project. OpenTelemetry will help you future-proof your
between system performance and business outcomes. In today’s observability practice, ensuring your systems are equipped to handle
always-on world, where every delay or outage ripples through whatever comes next. With more projects adopting this standard,
customer experiences and bottom lines, Splunk helps you connect you’ll even find new applications pre-instrumented and ready to
the dots. After all, observability problems are business problems. deliver insights right out of the box.
From pinpointing the root cause of a slowdown to quantifying its
revenue impact, Splunk transforms challenges into opportunities. Splunk Observability in action
Splunk Observability Cloud bundles all the tools you need (like The following case studies present real customer data and results
infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, from organizations using Splunk’s Observability Cloud products.
real user monitoring, synthetic monitoring, log exploration, and
incident response) into one powerful platform. It consolidates data
across any environment, whether you’re running traditional on-
prem systems, serverless functions, or cutting-edge cloud-native
architectures — ensuring you never miss a critical detail, no matter
how complex your ecosystem becomes.

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 Spotlight

Number one Latin American e-commerce company Rappi’s hockey-

stick growth, combined with the adoption of containers and
microservices across 6,000+ hosts, strained their legacy monitoring
platform, which lacked sophisticated and granular analytics, resulting
“
We’re all attuned to the potential
business impact of downtime, so we’re
grateful that Splunk Observability helps
in long delays to deliver alerts. After adopting Splunk Observability us be proactive about reliability and
Cloud, Rappi:
resilience with end-to-end visibility into
our environment.
Gained real-time observability across their environment. — Jose Felipe Lopez, Engineering Manager, Rappi

Reduced the MTTR in production from five minutes

to seconds.

Accessed more complex data analytics and better metrics

correlation, reducing MTTR.

Grew confident in their continued migration to a

microservices and serverless architecture, including ECS,
Kubernetes and AWS Lambda (100+ services).

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 Spotlight

Operating in over 165 countries with up to 201 billion itineraries

priced daily, Travelport relied on a complex mix of observability tools
to monitor product health and performance. The company needed
monitoring tools that worked smarter, not harder, and they turned
“
Top-line revenue is at risk every
minute we’re not fully up and running.
Splunk’s Assigned Expert rolled up their
to Splunk Observability Cloud. The team worked with a Splunk sleeves and found a way to optimize
Assigned Expert for strategic guidance, ensuring support for its key
customer-facing product and achieved:
our environment to better respond
to disruptions.
— Ed Hubbard, Director of Site Reliability and
75% reduction in MTTD. Monitoring, Travelport

Exceeded uptime goal, delivering better customer

experience.

95% reduction in false positives with Splunk

Observability Cloud.

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 Spotlight

For Velera credit union clients, uptime is the most important service
level agreement (SLA). But achieving Velera’s 99.995% target
requires sophisticated infrastructure monitoring — especially given
the organization’s cloud-based environment that orchestrates
“
The results were amazing. Switching
on Splunk AppDynamics for
Application Performance Monitoring
dozens of business-critical microservices. With Splunk, Velera saw was like walking into a room and
these key outcomes:
turning the lights on.
— Earl Diem, Vice President, Operations
Accelerated mean time to repair (MTTR) to <15 minutes. Engineering, Velera

3 billion transactions per month run 300% faster.

Delivered consistent 99.95% uptime.

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 Spotlight

Agero had always relied on sophisticated tooling internally for its

call center agents. But the company wanted to make them more
observable and offer a fully digital, transparent experience to
better pinpoint locations, dispatch vehicles, and provide the help
“
In an industry where phone calls are the
standard, Splunk’s observability solutions
have helped us modernize to deliver a
customers needed when they were in an accident or stranded on the 100% digital, agentless experience to our
road. That’s where Splunk came in, allowing Agero to modernize and
deliver a 100% digital, agentless experience to drivers in need. With
drivers in need of roadside assistance.
Splunk, Agero experienced: — Billy Macdonald, Senior Director, DevOps, Agero

100% digital, agentless experience now available

to customers.

18-point higher net promoter score over non-digital

experiences.

5% YOY increase in availability.

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Key takeaways
Here’s what you should remember as you embark on your observability journey:

Observability It’s a mindset, not It empowers It drives results. Splunk

conquers just a tool. everyone. With observability, Observability
complexity. Observability extends Observability isn’t just for you’ll reduce downtime, helps you see
It gives you the power to beyond traditional engineers. Developers, improve user experiences, everything,
make sense of modern monitoring to help you product managers, and make data-driven everywhere,
architectures and solve uncover insights and customer support teams, decisions that propel your all at once.
problems before they answer questions you and even executives can all business forward.
Splunk Observability Cloud
impact your business. didn’t even know to ask. benefit from the visibility is like a transformative
and insights it provides. force that turns complexity
into opportunity, helping
you deliver world-class
digital experiences
and stay ahead of
the competition.

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What’s next?
Ready to find your observability superpowers? To start, commit to
the observability mindset: a focus on visibility, collaboration, and
automation. Next, find a solution like Splunk Observability Cloud,
which provides the tools to monitor every layer of your system and
respond to incidents with precision. Learn what makes Splunk a
leading observability platform in this report.

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