From Basic Monitoring to Modern Observability: Shifting Right and Observability as Code

The observability market has undergone significant transformations over the years, evolving from basic monitoring to more comprehensive solutions that address the needs of various engineering functions and stages of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). The rise of cloud-native architectures, microservices, and distributed systems led to an explosion of data volumes, prompting vendors to consolidate all MELT data in one platform. Despite advancements in observability tooling and practices, a significant disparity remains between how these tools are leveraged across the SDLC and different engineering functions. Many vendors focus on post-deployment production problems, neglecting the needs of developers who require visibility into their code throughout the development process. This disparity is evident in the way many observability platforms are designed, often emphasizing brute-force data collection and analysis without providing actionable insights for developers. Monitoring as Code (MaC) offers a more efficient approach by integrating observability directly into the development workflow, focusing on control and efficiency, and providing benefits such as consistency, collaboration, automation, and high signal with low noise. By embedding monitoring into the codebase, engineers can define and maintain their monitoring configurations as part of their version control systems, ensuring reproducibility, collaboration, and automation. MaC has proven to be a simple and well-understood approach for developers to detect issues early in the SDLC.