A developer-centric approach to observability

Modern software development practices have significantly advanced over the past few years including applying DevOps practices and recently also the transformation towards platform engineering. Supporting that trend is a recent CNCF survey showing that 96% of organizations are leveraging Kubernetes and cloud-native frameworks as part of their application architecture.

These modern practices, while contributing to an advanced pace of innovation at a high scale within software development, also introduce challenges around troubleshooting and sustainability due to the nature of these modern applications.

Developers experience the following common challenges around the observability and debugging of cloud-native, serverless, and other distributed workloads:

• Limited to no access to remote production environments for debugging incidents.
• Risky security requirements for remotely debugging apps (for example, port forwarding)
• Requirements for additional and missing telemetry (such as logs or metrics) require re-deployments and new lengthy CI/CD processes.
• Complexities around the reproduction of remote environments that mimic production including feature-flag-based deployments.

Shifting observability left to developers is becoming an imperative in mature DevOps or platform engineering practices to be able to meet both MTTR and SLA requirements so as to ensure no business impact to customers. With lengthy debugging cycles and inefficiencies, developer productivity is being impacted, and so a more modern approach to observability is needed.

IBM Instana + Lightrun

IBM Instana provides automated observability for modern stacks, built specifically for the DevOps space. Instana provides real-time full-stack, observability that delivers high fidelity data to everyone who needs it in the context they need it in so problems can be identified and fixed quickly.

Instana integrates with many different products to provide robust, advanced application management and monitoring features. One such product integration is Lightrun.

Lightrun is a developer observability platform that allows developers to add telemetry data (logs, metrics, and traces) to live applications in real-time right from their IDE. The metrics that Lightrun emits can be immediately visualized in the Instana dashboard, because the Instana AutoProfile automatically attaches itself to the Lightrun process.

The integration of Lightrun with Instana provides a consolidated view of the telemetry data through the Instana environment, and it enables developers to carry out shift-left observability by adding unique, valuable, and actionable telemetry at runtime.

The following diagram shows you the step-by-step process of how Lightrun and Instana collaborate. The ingestion process encompasses the following stages:

1. Lightrun metrics are initially transmitted from the IDE Plugin to the Lightrun Management Server.
2. From the Lightrun Management Server, these metrics can be exported to a remote StatsD daemon.
3. Subsequently, the metrics are forwarded from the StatsD Sensor to Instana. It's noteworthy that Instana supports StatsD, allowing seamless forwarding of these metrics from StatsD to Instana. To activate this functionality, enable the StatsD Sensor in Instana's agent configuration settings.

You can read more about the integration of IBM Instana and Lightrun in this Lightrun Solution Brief.

Debugging with real-time observability

Integrating Instana with Lightrun simplifies the complexity of application development, and enables developers to build, monitor, and troubleshoot their applications quickly and efficiently. Whether you're building a new feature or troubleshooting an issue, you can transition between observability and debugging, all within the same interface.

Your debugging sessions are enriched with observability data, allowing you to pinpoint issues with precision. Developers can easily identify and resolve issues without the need for extensive code redeployment, reducing development cycles, and improving application quality.

Developers can continuously monitor, analyse, and improve application performance. Instana allows you to track application health and with the Lightrun integration, you can provide on-the-fly fixes and improve code all in the preproduction environment, thereby promoting a cycle of continuous enhancement.

Summary and next steps

Integrating Lightrun with IBM Instana brings together the best of observability and real-time debugging to streamline development, troubleshoot efficiently, and continuously improve application performance. It also improves collaboration between development and ops teams allowing for faster and more efficient DevOps workflows.

You can read more about the Instana observability platform in the articles and tutorials on IBM Developer. Or, try Instana for yourself.