• by Vikram Gajjala

The Difference Between Observability and Event Management

Observability and event management are vital processes that allow firms to respond fast to any arising issue. Whether a failed equipment or reduction in performance, both observability and event management will enable firms to stay ahead of events. This is possible because firms can detect such problems way in advance and take the necessary corrective measures.

Event management has been around much longer than Observability. It has been a vital cog that has helped service management flourish over the years, and Observability is a much newer concept that tech-leaning firms heavily adopt. As much as both contribute to a firm's ability to anticipate any issue, these two processes are distinct from one another. Let us see how to distinguish them easily!

Observability

Observability is a concept that results from control systems engineering. It refers to a process that measures the ease of understanding a system's internal states by looking at its external outputs. Observability is the process that provides the insight that the monitoring process uses. The main objective of Observability is to help firms to understand the causes of specific outcomes by looking at the effects of the events.
 

Observability is generally divided into three main pillars that include:

1. Logs

Logs refer to timestamped records of discrete events that help firms identify unpredictable occurrences in a system. Catalogues provide firms with valuable insight into the exact causes of unusual changes in the system's behaviour.
 

2. Metrics

Metrics refer to specific measurements or counts aggregated over a particular duration. Metrics are effective in situations that give you insight into the total amount of memory consumed by a method, the number of requests a service handles per second, etc.

3. Traces

Traces are crucial in helping you to follow the path a transaction or request follows from one node to the next in a distributed system. They will allow you to discover the exact components responsible for system errors and identify performance bottlenecks.

Value of Observability to business

Businesses and their related stakeholders can derive a lot of value from Observability. The benefits include:

1. Business owners can release their new products and services much faster. Observability helps developers avoid numerous trial and error instances during product development.

2. Observability enables business owners to remain informed continually. As a result, the probability of downtime is kept at a minimum which makes customers happier.

3. It provides a good overview of a firm's entire system, thus allowing operators, project managers, analysts, and other individuals to work in a highly interdependent environment. As a result, the overhead costs that may result from communication are significantly reduced.

Event Management

Event management is the process that forms the foundation of operational monitoring and control. Its primary objective is to manage the events throughout the lifecycle of a process. Event management helps firms to determine their most suitable control actions.

Events provide valuable insight into the firms' operational activities and communicate warnings and alerts. Therefore, event management focuses on generating and detecting proper notifications regarding the state of a firm's IT infrastructure. Here, events management can help firms automate routine activities such as balancing the demand of services across different devices to boost their performance. So, what are the goals of event management?

Objectives of the event management process 

1. It detects any existing change of state that can impact the management of a configuration item (CI) or IT service.

2. It offers the basis for comparing the actual operating performance and system behaviour against set design standards and SLAs.

3. An event management process supports service assurance and reporting. It also forms the foundation of service improvement.

4. The event management process also provides the entry point to execute service operation processes and operations management activities.

The event management process can meet these objectives using two types of tools that include active monitoring tools and passive monitoring tools. Functional monitoring tools are those that "poll" vital configuration items (CIs) to establish their availability and status. On the other hand, passive monitoring tools are responsible for detecting and correlating operational alerts that originate from CIs.

Event management is valuable to a business in the following ways:

1. It provides a platform for automated operations and therefore contributes to higher efficiency. All the firm's resources can thus be directed to the more urgent needs of a firm, e.g., designing new functionalities.

2.  It offers firms the ability to detect incidents way in advance to enable them to take the most appropriate measures and avert crises.

Final Take Away

Continuous automated Observability enables firms to be aware of looming risks and problems in an entire software development lifecycle. In addition, automated Observability provides visibility throughout the CI/CD pipeline and the firm's infrastructure. Firms can therefore get quick accurate information about their "health." On the other hand, event management helps firms build organizational resilience, reduce losses from business interruption, and lower costs from IT downtime. Event management also allows firms to have increased awareness regarding global risk events. While these two processes are fundamentally different, integrating them both into your firm's operations will enable the firm to be more productive!