Cloud-Native Observability: The Many-Faceted Benefits of Structured and Unified Logging—A Multi-Case Study

Nane Kratzke ()
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Nane Kratzke: Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Lübeck University of Applied Sciences, 23562 Lübeck, Germany

Future Internet, 2022, vol. 14, issue 10, 1-23

Abstract: Background: Cloud-native software systems often have a much more decentralized structure and many independently deployable and (horizontally) scalable components, making it more complicated to create a shared and consolidated picture of the overall decentralized system state. Today, observability is often understood as a triad of collecting and processing metrics, distributed tracing data, and logging. The result is often a complex observability system composed of three stovepipes whose data are difficult to correlate. Objective: This study analyzes whether these three historically emerged observability stovepipes of logs, metrics and distributed traces could be handled in a more integrated way and with a more straightforward instrumentation approach. Method: This study applied an action research methodology used mainly in industry–academia collaboration and common in software engineering. The research design utilized iterative action research cycles, including one long-term use case. Results: This study presents a unified logging library for Python and a unified logging architecture that uses the structured logging approach. The evaluation shows that several thousand events per minute are easily processable. Conclusions: The results indicate that a unification of the current observability triad is possible without the necessity to develop utterly new toolchains.

Keywords: cloud-native; observability; cloud computing; logging; structured logging; logs; metrics; traces; distributed tracing; log aggregation; log forwarding; log consolidation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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