Building An Observability Strategy

Simply put, observability tools speed up debugging time. They show you what is happening in your software so that you can drastically reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot bugs that affect your users. So it’s no surprise that digital companies use a lot.

But before you overflow your stack with many different tools, you need to understand what you need keep an eye on and how.

Focus on what matters

Companies often use more tools than they need. And they end up using only a small part of every tool they have.

In the long run this can be a serious cost. Instead of purchasing every new gadget, you need to find out what problems you want to solve, and what you need to solve them. Keep an eye only on what matters to deal with real issues.

Session Replays: They allow you to see exactly what your users are doing when they encounter issues on your website, every click, every scroll, as if it were happening on your own browser — it’s a no-brainer to reproduce issues.

Back-end & Front-end Logs: They alert you of exceptions and errors so that you know where problems occur and why.

Performance Metrics: They help you monitor the speed of you app so that you can uncover anything that is slowing it down and impacting your users’ experience.

Gather everything within a single platform

All these elements taken together give you a complete picture of everything that happens in your software when users browse your web app.

But having too many separate tools leads to what Gartner calls “disconnected islands”: when everyone uses their own specialized tools, it becomes difficult for teams to work together. Because of that, teams work in silos, often disconnected from what others are doing or working on.

Instead, you want to gather everything you need for debugging within a single platform so the information is easily accessible, and easy to collaborate on. OpenReplay, for example, allows you to integrate all your logging and performance reporting tools into its session replayer, so that you can understand and solve every issue easily.

Gathering everything you need to identify and solve issues within a single platform makes it much easier to quickly detect and act upon issues.

Instead of going back and forth between different observability tools trying to make sense of what is going on, you need complete visibility over your entire stack, for each user session.