What is Observability-driven Development (ODD)?

Observability is a crucial component in building modern distributed systems. It provides all the information to the developers, testers, and operations team to gain insights into how the system is working in terms of performance, behavior, and health.

Observability driven development is a paradigm shift in the development process, where we shift observability left to the software development life cycle itself. The core components of observability include metrics, logs, and traces, which provide a comprehensive view of an application's state and health.

In observability-driven development (ODD), developers instrument their code to gather detailed telemetry data, which helps in monitoring and understanding the behavior of applications in production. This process involves the use of various tools and techniques to collect, aggregate, and analyze data from different parts of the system.

Here is an overall diagram to showcase how trace based data is collected and stored using OpenTelemetry.

Benefits of Observability Driven Development

• Enhanced Debugging and Troubleshooting: Observability driven development provides deep visibility into application states and behaviors, making it easier for developers to identify, understand, and resolve issues quickly, even in the most complex systems.
• Proactive Issue Detection: With real-time insights, observability driven development allows teams to detect and address potential problems before they impact end-users, reducing downtime and improving reliability.
• Performance Optimization: Continuous insights into application performance enable teams to fine-tune and optimize systems proactively, ensuring better resource utilization and user experience.
• Faster Response to Incident: Real-time data and alerting facilitate quicker incident identification, enabling rapid response and mitigation to minimize the impact on users.
• Enhanced Testing and Quality Assurance: Observability data can be leveraged during testing to validate the correctness of applications according to their design and business requirements, ensuring higher quality and reliability before production deployment.
• Enhanced Collaboration and Transparency: Sharing observability data across development, operations, and business teams fosters better communication, alignment, and decision-making, leading to more cohesive and efficient workflows.

The industry leaders are also shifting towards ODD. Charity Majors, CTO of Honeycomb, coined the term ODD.

 Important Observability Driven Development Features 

The methodology emphasizes the importance of understanding how applications behave and perform in real time by leveraging observability tools and techniques. When adopting a tool, we should focus on a few of its important features for ODD.

• Comprehensive Instrumentation: Instrumenting code to collect detailed metrics, logs, and traces.
• Real-time Monitoring and Alerting: Continuous monitoring of system performance with timely alerts for abnormal behavior.
• Trace-based Testing: Using trace data to validate and optimize system performance, especially in distributed architectures.
• Integrations with Other Tools: Seamless integration with various observability and DevOps tools.
• User-friendly Dashboards: Visual interfaces for displaying metrics, logs, and traces, facilitating quick data interpretation.

We are going to discuss the top 9 tools that facilitate the adoption of Observability Driven Development (ODD). These tools provide essential features for monitoring, tracing, alerting, and visualizing application performance and behavior, thereby helping developers maintain robust, efficient, and resilient systems.

Top 9 tools for Observability Driven Development

Tracetest

Tracetest lets you test distributed apps using distributed tracing. It checks your app's behavior by asserting on spans within a trace, leveraging data from OpenTelemetry-instrumented code.

Built for observability-driven development, Tracetest helps back-end engineers boost service observability during development. You can create, run, and view tests all in one place, with automatic end-to-end test generation for systems using distributed tracing.

Tracetest works seamlessly with Jaeger, Grafana Tempo, New Relic, Lightstep, Opensearch, Datadog, and more. As a fresh addition to the CNCF landscape, it has an open-source core on GitHub and a SaaS platform.

Key Features

• Tracetest uses OpenTelemetry for code instrumentation, capturing detailed trace data to analyze microservices' performance and interactions.
• Offers real-time monitoring capabilities using trace data, allowing alerts to be set for latency spikes or errors detected during analysis.
• Facilitates trace-based testing, verifying service interactions and performance across distributed systems to pinpoint bottlenecks and inefficiencies.
• Integrates seamlessly with popular trace data stores like Grafana, Jaeger, Datadog, and Elastic, enabling cross-platform data visualization for deeper insights.
• Provides intuitive dashboards for visualizing trace data, enabling quick interpretation of performance metrics and trends.
• Includes built-in anomaly detection for identifying unusual patterns in trace data.

Pros

• Facilitates automated testing using trace data to verify service interactions and performance.
• Provides detailed views of individual traces, showing service interactions, timings, and statuses.
• Natively integrates with observability vendors

Cons

Dependency on OpenTelemetry for comprehensive instrumentation

Pricing

Free

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Honeycomb

Honeycomb is an observability platform that helps you debug and understand complex systems. It provides real-time data analytics and visualization, enabling you to explore high-cardinality data, trace requests, and quickly identify performance bottlenecks and anomalies in your distributed applications.

Key Features

• Excels in distributed tracing, providing end-to-end visibility into how requests flow through microservices.
• Allows the creation of dynamic alerts based on thresholds and patterns identified in trace and metric data. Also supports Service Level Objective (SLO) based alerting to notify about any performance-related issues.
• Provides a dynamic dashboard with multiple customization options with high cardinality data for detailed insights
• Integrates to gather trace data from multiple well-known observability tools or frameworks like Prometheus, Datadog, and OpenTelemetry and helps in visualization with the dashboard

Pros

• Allows querying on high-cardinality fields to gain deep insights.
• Helps identify outliers and anomalies by visually comparing different sets of data.

Cons

• High cost associated with high-volume data ingestion and storage.
• Requires significant configuration for optimal use in complex environments.
• Does not support trace-based testing out of the box

Pricing

It offers three tiers: Free, Pro ($130/month), and Enterprise. More details can be obtained from here.

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Grafana

Grafana is a powerful open-source platform for monitoring and observability. It allows you to visualize, query, and alert your metrics and logs no matter where they are stored. With its rich set of plugins and integrations, Grafana enables you to create interactive and customizable dashboards for a unified view of your systems.

Key Features

• Ingest trace data from the most popular observability tools/protocols, including OpenTelmetry, Jaeger, and Zipkin.
• Offers highly customizable and interactive dashboards, allowing users to create and modify visualizations to fit their needs
• Allows users to define alerting rules directly from the dashboard panels.

Pros

• Can create a comprehensive monitoring dashboard that includes server performance metrics, application logs, and trace data from Jaeger.
• Combine metrics, logs, and traces from multiple sources in a single Grafana dashboard for a holistic view of the system's health and performance.

Cons

• Limited native support for detailed trace data analysis without additional plugins.
• A complex setup is required to integrate with some data sources.

Pricing

It offers four tiers: Free, Pro (Pay as you go), Advanced ($299/month), and Enterprise. Custom plans can be created. More details can be obtained from here.

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SigNoz

SigNoz is an open-source application performance monitoring (APM) and observability tool. It helps you monitor your applications by collecting and visualizing metrics, traces, and logs. SigNoz is designed to work seamlessly with OpenTelemetry, providing insights into the performance and health of your distributed systems.

Key Features

• Provides detailed distributed tracing capabilities, enabling end-to-end request tracking.
• Allows setting up alerts based on predefined thresholds and custom queries.
• Offers customizable dashboards for visualizing application performance metrics and traces.
• Integrates with Prometheus Jaeger for unified analysis of trace data.

Pros

• Comes with pre-configured dashboards for quick setup and monitoring.
• Single place for traces, logs and metrics
• Running aggregates on logs and traces is very efficient 

Cons

• SigNoz does not work on Windows. It runs on Mac and Linux
• Lacks SIEM

Pricing

SigNoz Cloud offers two tiers - Teams ( $199/month) and Enterprise Cloud. It also provides a Community edition to be used in your own infra. More details can be obtained from here.

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Datadog

Datadog is a cloud-based monitoring and security platform for IT and DevOps teams. It offers comprehensive monitoring for servers, databases, tools, and services, providing real-time visibility into the entire tech stack. Datadog integrates logs, metrics, and traces to give you a unified view of your infrastructure and applications.

Key Features

• Provides robust distributed tracing capabilities to track requests across services.
• Supports complex alert conditions and multi-condition alerts.
• Offers dynamic and interactive dashboards with drag-and-drop features that update in real time.
• Integrates with many observability tools/protocols like Open telemetry, Cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, etc.

Pros

• Combines infrastructure monitoring, APM, log management, and security monitoring in a single platform.
• Provides real-time dashboards that update continuously.
• Uses machine learning to detect anomalies and set dynamic alert thresholds.
• Detailed APM and distributed tracing to track application performance.

Cons

• High cost, especially for full-feature access and data retention.
• Dependency on integrations for some advanced monitoring capabilities.

Pricing

It offers three tiers: Free, Pro ($15/host/month), and Enterprise ($23/host/month). More details can be obtained from here.

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Prometheus

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit designed for reliability and scalability. It collects and stores metrics as time-series data, providing powerful querying capabilities and flexible alerting. Prometheus is particularly well-suited for monitoring containerized environments and integrates seamlessly with Kubernetes.

Key Features

• Store long-term metrics data for historical analysis with an efficient time-series database and scaling functionality through sharding and federation.
• With PromQL, metrics query becomes easier.
• Integrates with other observability tools and open-source libraries. 

Pros

• Prometheus uses a powerful multidimensional data model with time series data identified by metric name and key-value pairs.
• PromQL (Prometheus Query Language) allows for flexible queries to analyze collected data.
• Prometheus is designed to be highly scalable, supporting thousands of time series metrics.

Cons

• The lack of built-in support for distributed tracing primarily focuses on metrics.
• Scalability challenges with large-scale deployments and data volumes.

Pricing

Free

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Digma

Digma is a continuous feedback platform that enhances developer experience by integrating observability directly into the development workflow. It provides actionable insights and real-time feedback on code changes, helping developers understand the impact of their changes and improve code quality and performance.

Key Features

• Provides essential support for tracing, primarily focusing on development metrics.
• Supports alerts focused on the development process, such as failing builds or decreasing test coverage.
• Provides customizable dashboards tailored to developer needs like build times, test coverage, and commit frequency.

Pros

• Focuses on metrics relevant to the software development lifecycle.
• Integrates with popular CI/CD tools like Jenkins and GitHub Actions.

Cons

• Relatively new with potential gaps in maturity and feature set.
• Limited ecosystem and integrations compared to more established tools.

Pricing

Offers two tiers - Digma Dev and Digma for Teams. More details can be obtained from here.

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Jaeger

Jaeger is an open-source end-to-end distributed tracing tool. It helps you monitor and troubleshoot transactions in complex microservices environments. Jaeger enables you to track request flows, measure latencies, and pinpoint performance issues by visualizing traces collected from your applications.

Key Features

• Specializes in distributed tracing, capturing detailed traces across multiple microservices.
• Provides powerful visualization for distributed traces by showing the interaction between different microservices.

Pros

• Specializes in detailed distributed tracing for microservices.
• Displays service dependency graphs to understand service interactions.
• Facilitates root cause analysis by providing detailed trace data.

Cons

• Lacks the capability to write trace-based testing.
• Requires substantial effort for setup and maintenance, especially in complex environments.
• Has limited alerting capability

Pricing

Free

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Malabi

Malabi is a testing tool focused on end-to-end tests for microservices. It integrates with your distributed tracing setup to create more effective and insightful tests. By leveraging trace data, Malabi helps you ensure that your microservices interact correctly and maintain the desired behavior across different services and components.

Key Features

• Specializes in automated visual testing, ensuring UI consistency across different browsers and devices.
• Provides visual diffs highlighting differences between baseline and current screenshots.
• Supports integration with CI/CD pipelines for continuous visual testing.
• Executes tests across multiple browsers and versions to ensure compatibility.
• Offers dashboards and detailed reports with visual comparisons and test results.

Pros

• Validate any integration between parts of a distributed system before you push it to production.
• Add a simple JavaScript-based assertion library to any microservice you want to test.

Cons

• Malabi isn't designed with observability in mind, which means it has no features in this area.

Pricing

Free

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Conclusion

Observability-driven development (ODD) is transforming how developers and operations teams build and maintain complex, distributed systems. By leveraging the top observability tools like Tracetest, Honeycomb, Grafana, SigNoz, Datadog, Prometheus, Digma, Jaeger, and Malabi, teams can gain real-time insights into system performance, quickly diagnose and resolve issues, and improve overall reliability. These tools provide comprehensive features such as distributed tracing, metrics collection, and customizable dashboards, which are crucial for effective ODD. Embracing these technologies helps create resilient, high-performing applications, fostering better collaboration and faster innovation across development and operations teams.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q 1. What is observability-driven development?

Observability-driven development (ODD) is a practice where developers build and enhance software with a strong focus on observability. This means integrating tools and techniques like logging, metrics and distributed tracing from the start. By doing so, developers gain deep insights into how their code behaves in real time, making it easier to detect, diagnose, and fix issues quickly. ODD helps ensure that applications are not just functional but also transparent and resilient, enabling faster debugging and more reliable performance in production

Q 2. What are the pillars of observability?

• Logging: Captures detailed event data from your application, helping diagnose specific issues.
• Metrics: Provides numerical data about system performance, like CPU usage or request counts, offering insights into overall health.
• Tracing: Tracks the flow of requests through your system, showing how different services interact and where delays occur.

Together, these pillars give you a comprehensive view of your application's behavior, making it easier to monitor, debug, and optimize.

Q 3. What is the driving factor for observability?

The driving factor for observability is the need to understand and debug complex, distributed systems in real time. Key reasons include:

• Complexity of Distributed Systems: Modern applications use microservices and cloud-native architectures, which traditional monitoring can't adequately handle.
• Real-Time Insights: Provides deep insights into system behavior, enabling quick issue identification and resolution.
• Performance and Reliability: Helps ensure applications run smoothly and reliably.
• User Experience: Improves overall user satisfaction by maintaining optimal performance.
• Development and Deployment: Supports rapid development and deployment cycles, fostering a more agile environment.