Nobl9 today added a Replay capability to its service level objectives (SLO) management platform that makes it simpler to collect the historical data a DevOps team needs to get started.
Nobl9 COO Kit Merker said Nobl9 Replay makes service level indicator (SLI) data instantly available in minutes using 30 days of historical data collected from observability and application performance monitoring (APM) platforms. Previously, DevOps teams would have had to wait as long as a month before the Nobl9 platform could collect enough spreadsheet data to create a graph that identified the relationship between various services.
Nobl9 now enables historical data to be merged with data collected in real-time to allow DevOps teams to view SLO charts and generate reports shortly after creating an SLO within a Git-based workflow.
Nobl9 is trying to spur greater adoption of SLOs by making available an open source SLO specification that defines a common interface for constructing them that has garnered support from Dynatrace, Sumo Logic and others. SLOs, of course, are not a new idea; they have been used as a metric to track the performance of IT services for decades. However, as more microservices-based applications are built and deployed, it’s becoming more challenging to maintain SLOs across applications that have many more dependencies than legacy monolithic applications.
The Nobl9 platform is designed to enable DevOps teams to employ an SLO-as-code approach that makes it simpler to gather the metrics that confirm whether SLOs are being achieved.
It’s not clear whether reliance on SLOs has waned over the years or if application environments simply became too complex to track meaningful metrics. A recent survey conducted by Dimensional Research on behalf of Nobl9, however, found a full 94% of respondents that have or plan to implement SLOs intend to map them directly to business operations, with 91% reporting they expect that effort to improve decision-making. More than 80% also said their organizations are planning to increase the use of SLOs, with 87% indicating SLOs should improve overall microservices performance.
The issue is that most organizations have limited visibility into their IT environments. The survey found less than half of respondents (46%) had visibility into all their IT environments. Only 45% and 35% claim to have visibility into containers and microservices, respectively. More than three-quarters (78%) said hybrid clouds make observability more difficult, even though 45% said they already employed 11 or more observability and monitoring tools. Trying to track SLOs using tools such as Grafana dashboards that DevOps teams need to set up and maintain is simply too difficult, noted Merker.
As applications are increasingly constructed using services that drive digital business transformation initiatives, it’s now only a matter of time before SLOs are more widely tracked. That will enable DevOps teams to not only ascertain their current level of performance but also more easily work toward achieving their actual performance goals, he added.
The challenge is that defining an SLO in a highly dynamic application environment where services are added and replaced with much greater frequency is often a lot easier than maintaining it.
