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Keeping an eye on the Four Golden Signals
Business companies are increasingly dependent on complicated software systems as digitization accelerates. Business organisations must routinely evaluate the device’s performance to maintain high availability. Many companies are moving to cloud architecture, which is more difficult to oversee. Customers may not care what technology is utilised to provide services, but how well the digital channels function will affect their opinions.
Customers can readily switch to other digital platforms if a service application is slow. Businesses offer a variety of microservices through digital channels. Traditional tools are no longer capable of monitoring microservices in the digital age. It is for this reason that CXOs should be familiar with the four golden signals of monitoring when it comes to complex and sophisticated software systems and commercial applications.
Monitoring Golden Signals: What You Need to Know
Google was the first to introduce the four golden signals for monitoring. For improved results, many commercial organisations have embraced the four golden signals over time. Traffic, latency, saturation, and errors are the four signals, respectively. There are two monitoring methods in addition to the four golden signals. The following are the two methods for monitoring with golden signals:
- USE (Utilization, Saturation, and Errors) is a monitoring method used for measuring the performance of any software system.
- RED (Rate, Errors, and Duration) is used by many business organizations for service monitoring. It focuses on increasing uptime and service availability.
To maintain high service reliability, corporate organisations must monitor application performance. To achieve high uptime of service applications, an SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) should be aware of the golden signals.
The golden signals for monitoring
- Latency
When a user visits a service application or website, it makes requests to the host server. The host server approves the request of the users that helps them in accessing the services via digital channels. Latency is defined as the time taken by the host server to approve the request of a real user. If latency is high, users may deviate to some other website or business application. For example, if your website is taking more time to load, users may get frustrated. Besides ensuring high service availability, one also must ensure the high performance of business applications or websites.
CXOs usually measure the average latency by considering all user requests. By doing so, you may not pay special attention to requests that are fulfilled in long durations. If 90% of requests are fulfilled quickly and, 10% are approved slowly, it can still hamper your service reliability. It is why a business organization should focus on high latency requests along with measuring average latency. Since legacy tools cannot measure the latency of all requests, business organizations are using AIOps for application performance monitoring. AIOps can handle the complexity of modern-day applications that are complex and higher in number.
- Traffic
Typically, one may think of traffic as the number of real site visitors. However, when talking about golden signals, traffic means the load users put on an application. All the users using an application are combined to measure the total load. There are many ways to measure the traffic on websites and service applications. For example, business organizations measure the HTTP requests per second to determine the load on the website. To fine-tune user experience, measuring the traffic is of utmost importance. Measuring traffic can let you know which applications/websites are working fine and which ones need work. Real-time user monitoring tools can help CXOs in measuring traffic for different software systems and service applications.
- Errors
In layman’s terms, application performance monitoring is finding performance errors and fixing them before they affect the service availability. However, CXOs should know what exactly causes errors in the service applications. For example, if an HTTP request by the user returns ‘500 status’, it implies that there must be an internal service error. For each HTTP request, the right content should be returned to the user. If incorrect content is returned for an HTTP request, it can also be counted as an error. Errors should be identified in real-time and, AI for application monitoring is the only solution.
- Saturation
Saturation is defined as the percentage of an application or software system being used. For example, if the saturation of a web application is 100%, it implies the application is being used to its fullest. High saturation means performance degradation is likely to occur. 100% saturation can even result in device failure. Application performance monitoring tools should measure all metrics that can help you understand the state of your software systems and service applications.
Your saturation level should not be too high and too low. If your saturation level is less than 50%, it means you are spending much on applications that are not being used. Measuring the saturation is also important for slashing costs spent in running service applications and software systems. High observability can help a business organization know more about the saturation of web applications and software systems.
How does AIOps help with Golden Signals monitoring?
Monitoring application performance has progressed over time. Due to the rising complexity of service applications, it is difficult to keep track of the golden signals. Through high-end data analytics, AIOps can assist in identifying real-time performance metrics. With AIOps, performance errors and saturation may be detected in real time.
An AIOps-based analytics platform can help IT teams repair mistakes by providing actionable insights. With AIOps, you’ll not only improve service availability, but also the customer experience. Real-time service dashboards are included with the leading AIOps technologies and products, allowing you to track performance metrics in real time. With AIOps, incident management is simplified, and you can ensure that your business applications are always available.
Conclusion
In 2020, the global AIOps market have surpassed USD 12 billion. The AIOps business will grow at a rapid pace in the upcoming years. It’s time for corporate organisations to use AIOps to monitor application performance. Begin utilising the golden signals for efficient monitoring today!
