Cloud Observability

  • Release version: Washingtondc
  • Updated February 1, 2024
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Cloud Observability

    ServiceNow Cloud Observability enables customers to gain insights into both cloud-native and monolithic applications, allowing for rapid detection and response to changes. It integrates metrics, logs, and traces into a unified workflow, enhancing developer productivity and operational efficiency.

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    Key Features

    • Unified Telemetry Data: Collect and analyze metrics, logs, and traces in one platform to resolve service issues quickly.
    • Cross-Team Collaboration: Harmonizes the efforts of SREs, DevOps, and IT Ops for improved business outcomes.
    • OpenTelemetry Integration: Supports the OpenTelemetry framework to manage telemetry data across various tools, enhancing flexibility.
    • Service Graph Connector for OpenTelemetry: Unique integration allowing open-source data to populate the CMDB, certified by ServiceNow.

    Key Outcomes

    By leveraging Cloud Observability, organizations can improve system health monitoring, troubleshoot issues effectively, and enhance collaboration across teams. This leads to faster resolution of cloud-native service problems and better overall business performance.

    Gain insights to detect and quickly respond to changes in cloud-native and monolithic applications.

    Capabilities that scale with your business

    Observability enables you to unify metrics, logs, and traces into a single workflow. With ServiceNow Cloud Observability (formerly  Lightstep), navigate easily from effect to cause, and untether developer productivity and efficiency.

    View and download the data sheet to learn more about Cloud Observability.

    Cloud Observability offers a holistic solution that unifies critical telemetry data in a unified platform so that you can resolve cloud-native service issues faster, enhance cross-team collaboration, and harmonize site reliability engineers (SREs), DevOps, and IT Ops practices to deliver better business outcomes. 

    Cloud Observability Workflow

    Cloud Observability Workflow diagram

    Important Links

    Cloud Observability log-in page

    Log in to the product

    Documentation

    Cloud Observability learning portal

    APIs

    Interact with Cloud Observability programmatically

    GitHub

    Visit Cloud Observability's GitHub presence

    Learn

    • What is Observability?

      Observability is the ability to quickly and efficiently gain insight into the health of your tech estate by gathering, correlating, and interpreting metrics, distributed traces, and log data. It lets you understand a system from the outside without knowing its inner workings. It also allows you to troubleshoot, handle problems, and answer the question, “Why is this happening"?

    • What is OpenTelemetry?

      OpenTelemetry is an  observability  framework and toolkit designed to create and manage  telemetry data  such as  traces,  metrics, and  logs. It’s vendor- and tool-agnostic, so you can use it with a broad variety of open-source tools, as well as commercial offerings. OpenTelemetry is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)  project.

    • What are metrics?

      Metrics are structured data that contain numeric values that measure a particular item over time, such as a business key performance indicator or the number of subscribers to a website. Metrics can be used to track the performance of a system or business and identify trends and patterns over time.

    • What are logs?

      A log is a text record of an incident that occurred at a specific time. It includes a timestamp, a unique ID for the component involved, and a description of the event or error. Logs can be stored as plain text, binary data, or structured files, with the latter being especially useful for observability because they’re easy to query.

    • What are traces?

      Traces are data that flow through a distributed system from start to finish. They're uniquely identified and contain important metadata, such as the microservice or serverless function that processes a request. Traces are useful for understanding the flow of requests through a system and identifying bottlenecks or other issues.

    • What is the Service Graph Connector for OpenTelemetry?

      Service Graph Connectors (SGC) enable you to load large volumes of data quickly and easily into your CMDB. The SGC for OpenTelemetry is a bit different from most, because, for the first time in ServiceNow history, you can bring open-source data into the CMDB. This connector offers the benefits of a thriving open-source community and is certified by the ServiceNow Service Graph Connectors Program that mitigates the risk associated with third-party integrations.