Introduction to
Rakuten SixthSense
Observability (AO)

Imagine you're managing a bustling city. You need to ensure traffic flows smoothly, utilities are functioning, and services are available to all residents. You can't be everywhere at once, but by observing traffic cameras, utility meters, and service reports, you get a clear picture of the city's health. This is similar to what observability does for IT systems.

What is Observability?

Observability is about understanding what's happening inside a system by looking at its outputs. Think of it as having a dashboard that tells you how every part of your car is performing without having to peek under the hood. In the context of IT, observability means using tools and techniques to get insights into how applications and infrastructure are functioning by analyzing data like logs, metrics, and traces.

Why Do We Need Observability?

In the past, systems were simpler and could be monitored using straightforward tools that checked specific metrics like CPU usage or server uptime. Today, applications are much more complex, often running on multiple servers and interacting with various services. This complexity makes it harder to detect and diagnose issues using traditional monitoring alone.

Here's why observability is crucial:

1. Proactive Issue Detection: Traditional monitoring might alert you when something breaks, but observability helps you see potential problems before they cause outages. For example, if an e-commerce website is slowing down, observability tools can highlight the exact cause, such as a specific database query that's taking too long.
2. Comprehensive Understanding: Observability provides a holistic view of system health. Instead of looking at isolated metrics, you see how different parts of the system interact. This is especially important in complex environments like microservices architectures where multiple services work together to handle user requests.
3. Improving User Experience: By understanding how your systems behave under various conditions, you can optimize performance to ensure users have a seamless experience. For instance, observability can help you identify and fix slow response times in a banking app, ensuring transactions are processed quickly.

Bringing Observability to Life: Real-World use cases

• E-commerce: During events like Black Friday, observability ensures that platforms run smoothly under pressure by identifying and resolving performance issues, ensuring uninterrupted shopping experiences.
• Finance: In the financial services industry, observability helps detect and resolve issues within payment gateways, transaction processing, and fraud detection systems, ensuring seamless and secure operations.

Observability with Rakuten SixthSense

Rakuten SixthSense brings unified observability by integrating logs, metrics, and traces into one powerful platform. But it doesn't stop there. SixthSense extends observability to critical pillars like AIOps for managing entire infrastructure, data, API security, and Gen AI observability, offering a comprehensive view of your business. This unified approach helps businesses monitor application performance, infrastructure, and security under one roof, ensuring proactive issue detection, advanced diagnostics, and real-time monitoring for optimized, secure operations across industries.

Observability is essential for modern IT operations, enabling businesses to understand and optimize their systems effectively. Ready to delve deeper into observability and how it can benefit your business? Visit our website to learn more.