Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
Nobl9 today announced it has made available via an open public beta program a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for correlating business goals against data collected by observability tools.
Unlike observability platforms that only aggregate metrics, the Nobl9 Service Level Objective (SLO) Platform applies that data to specific reliability targets defined by the business, company CEO Marcin Kurc said.
Compatible with monitoring platforms such as Datadog, New Relic and Prometheus, Nobl9 SLO Platform calculates uses monitoring data to calculate acceptable rates of error per service threshold and can be configured to trigger alerts and even workflows in anticipation of outages, Kurc said. The critical difference is knowing which metrics are truly impacting customer experiences.
The platform also enables DevOps teams to create business rules and define “facets” of users based on application experiences required. DevOps teams can identify users who are being serviced poorly in addition to tracking groups of users. They also codify contractual service level agreements (SLAs) down to critical business periods, said Kurc. The Nobl9 SLO Platform is accessible via a CLI/GUI/API for everything, Kubernetes-like YAML SLO-as-code or a sloctl command line.
This approach also has a significant impact on the cost of monitoring because the Nobl9 SLO Platform makes it easier to identify what data needs to be stored versus deleted, noted Kurc.
Armed with those insights, Kurc said it then becomes easier for DevOps teams to either determine how to make systems more reliable or lower reliability goals to reduce costs when possible. IT organizations will also spend much less time finger-pointing because the root cause of any issue will be much more readily apparent, he noted, adding the Nobl9 SLO Platform provides access to both real-time and historical reports to enable DevOps teams to achieve both those goals.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s a lot more focus on observability than ever. Organizations are relying more on digital business process to survive. The difference between surviving and thriving in this new era will come down to observability of not just the IT environment but also the entire digital business process.
It may be a while before most organizations fully equate profit and revenue to the performance of their IT environments. However, it’s becoming increasingly clear that it’s not enough to simply make sure IT environments are available. Customers are judging organizations by their ability to drive a quality experience within the context of a digital business process spanning multiple applications. Organizations that are unable to meet those expectations will soon find themselves being cast aside in favor of those that can.
Naturally, those requirements will put a lot of pressure on IT teams that often don’t have a lot of visibility into a business process. There is no end of alerts being generated by the system that are closely monitored, but the bulk of those alerts lack business context. Undoubtedly, there soon will be plenty of ways to gain that context. The challenge now is explaining to business leaders now why it’s needed before it’s too late.
