Annual Inventory｜A Review of Alibaba Cloud's Observable Practice in 2021

Author: Bai

The observability and fault analysis of the system are important metrics in system operation and maintenance. With the evolution of technical architecture, resource units, resource acquisition methods, and communication methods, great challenges have been encountered. These challenges are also forcing the development of O&M-related technologies. Throughout the development history of operation and maintenance monitoring, monitoring and observability have been developed for nearly 30 years.

Today, with the implementation of cloud native architecture, the application architecture has gradually changed from a monolithic system to microservices, and business logic has subsequently become calls and requests between microservices. At the same time, the virtualization is more thorough, the container management platform is accepted by more and more enterprises, the three-party components have gradually evolved into cloud services, and the entire application architecture has become a cloud-native architecture. The service call path becomes longer, which makes the traffic direction uncontrollable and increases the difficulty of troubleshooting. The observability of continuous analysis in the entire application life process of development, testing, operation and maintenance by covering all kinds of observable data (indicators, logs, links, events) in the full stack has become a must-have capability for all enterprises.

More and more enterprises realize that observability has become a cloud-native infrastructure and a necessary capability, and the observability domain has also evolved from a pure operation and maintenance state to a test and development state. The purpose of observability has further expanded from supporting the normal operation of the business to accelerating business innovation and allowing the business to iterate rapidly.

Looking back on 2021, Alibaba Cloud will continue to explore the observable field. While serving tens of millions of customers, it will actively summarize and refine its own exploration and practice in the observable field. Help enterprises build a full-stack cloud-native observable platform with the help of Application Real-Time Monitoring Service (ARMS).

Therefore, we take stock of the key content in 2021 today, and give you a complete review of Alibaba Cloud Observable 2021.

Part 1: Quick overview of key new products

(1) Grafana service: "2021 Yunqi Conference Open Source Gravity Summit released strategic cooperation, what exactly is Grafana service? 》

​​https://developer.aliyun.com/article/795852​​

(2) Kubernetes monitoring: "When containers are used more and more widely, how should we monitor containers?

​​https://developer.aliyun.com/article/786530​​

(3) Cloud call test: "Refuse to be a scapegoat! How to use website performance optimization to drive product experience improvement"

​​https://developer.aliyun.com/article/785937​​

(4) Intelligent alarm: "In the face of strong winds, how to build a highly coordinated and precise alarm system?

​​https://developer.aliyun.com/article/794013​​

(5) Application Security: "How to Strengthen Application Security Capability and Comprehensively Intercept Log4j Vulnerability Attacks"

​​https://developer.aliyun.com/article/845136​​

Part 2: Comprehensive review of the series of courses

(1) Observable series of open courses

"Vol.1ALL in one: How to build an end-to-end observable system"

​​https://yqh.aliyun.com/live/detail/26691​​

"Vol.2 Best Practices for Full-Link Tracking of Services"

​​https://yqh.aliyun.com/live/detail/26692​​

"Vol.3 Business & User Experience Observable Scenario Interpretation"

​​https://yqh.aliyun.com/live/detail/26696​​

"Vol.4 How to Establish an Efficient Alarm System to Improve Daily Operation and Maintenance Efficiency"

​​https://developer.aliyun.com/live/248036​​

(2) Website performance and experience optimization series of public courses

"How Vol.1 Uses Performance Optimization to Drive User Experience Improvement"

​​https://yqh.aliyun.com/live/detail/26181​​

"How to perform CDN and download optimization analysis in Vol.2"

​​https://yqh.aliyun.com/live/detail/26215​​

"Vol.3 Best Practices for Hijacking Discovery, Location and Resolution"

​​https://yqh.aliyun.com/live/detail/26706​​

(3) "Kubernetes Monitoring Series Open Courses"

"Vol.1 Explore Application Architecture and Discover Unexpected Network Traffic"

https://yqh.aliyun.com/live/detail/26360

"Vol.2 How to Find Abnormalities of Services and Workloads in Kubernetes"

​​https://yqh.aliyun.com/live/detail/26421​​

"Vol.3 Using Kubernetes to monitor and discover the problem of resource usage and uneven traffic distribution"

​​https://yqh.aliyun.com/live/detail/26606​​

"Vol.4 How to use Kubernetes to monitor and locate slow calls? 》

​​https://yqh.aliyun.com/live/detail/26835​​

"Vol.5 Using Kubernetes to monitor and locate the root cause of abnormal Pod status"

​​https://yqh.aliyun.com/live/detail/27006​​

Part3: Industry practice case sharing

"ARMS escorts the deep painting intelligent system and brings the ultimate user experience"

​​https://developer.aliyun.com/article/781580​​

"Walnut Programming: The Road to Front-End Observability Construction"

​​https://developer.aliyun.com/article/781396​​

"Cloud Dial Test Helps Jieka Robot to Fully Optimize Overseas Website Performance"

​​https://developer.aliyun.com/article/792477​​

"Cloud Dialing and Testing Helps Weidong Cloud Education and Comprehensively Improve Global User Experience"

​​https://developer.aliyun.com/article/858688​​

Part4: Classic e-book download

"Website Performance and Experience Optimization Guide"

​​https://developer.aliyun.com/topic/download?spm=5176.25571740.J_8000295170.2.7ccf363cC16UPK&id=7952​​

"Double Eleven E-commerce Website User Experience Report"

​​https://developer.aliyun.com/special/download?spm=a2c6h.14164896.0.0.3d434ffbfs2YMg&id=8196​​

For more on observables, click here ​!