Why Startups should focus on Observability early
Introduction
What is observability?
Observability is a property of a system which focuses on the ability for any engineer to be able to find out what is happening within the system at any given time, this is typically done with a set of tools that gather various components application metrics, logs and traces.
Why does it matter?
Observability matters because without it, you would be essentially flying blind, building observability into your systems early allows you to be able to keep track of your metrics from the start and track how they progress as the system grows. Observability also aids significantly in the debugging process, engineers can easily pinpoint exact metrics and logs occurring at the time of an error, as well track the request back through the system with traces.
What challenges do Startups face?
The challenge set for startups typically includes:
- Rapid growth
- Limited resources
- Quick iteration
Building observability early in a startup can aid in each of these challenges, with a well designed and used observability platform, you can:
- Be comfortable growing rapidly as you can track every aspect of the system and evaluate new services or components by their metrics as they are added.
- Reduce the resources needed for firefighting, engineers will have the entire history of the system at their finger tips to allow themselves to debug and fight fires as they show up.
- Quickly iterate and be proactive with problem detection, if an error arises from a new release, you could catch it in a metric tracking logs per second, and automatically roll back to the previous release.
Essentially, investing in observability early can accelerate growth, reduce downtime and improve you overall product quality.
The cost of not focusing on Observability
Fighting fires and debugging in the dark
Without properly tooling, debugging errors can be exceptionally time-consuming not to mention demoralising for the team or individual which is doing the debugging.
An example of this is the Crowdstrike falcon platform outage of July 2024, with appropriate use of canary deployments and an observability platform making use of logs coming from the canary deployments platform, it should have been clearer that there was an error in the release and it could have been rolled back quickly.
Losing customers and reputation
Startups are in a growth phase which is critical to their long term feasibility, any issues in reliability which directly impact the experience of users will impact the startups ability to retain existing users aswell as acquire new users.
Unmonitored systems are far more likely to have degraded customer experiences and to experience unplanned downtime, many studies have proven that unplanned downtime are expensive, A study sponsored by ServiceMax showed that:
The cost of unplanned downtime is 10 times that of planned downtime
Another study, performed by the Aberdeen Group found that:
In industrial manufacturing, downtime cost around $260,000 dollars an hour on average
Scaling chaos
Without observability, when and how to scale your infrastructure becomes guesswork, in 2021 a study performed by HashiCorp found that
nearly 40% of all organisations had exceeded their cloud budgets,
knowing which decisions to make and when can save significantly on cloud costs.
Achieve Startup Success with Observability
Every second counts for startups. Downtime can cost you customers, revenue and reputation. Without clear insights into your systems, scaling effectively can become a guessing game.
Observability is more than just a nice-to-have, it is a must-have for startups aiming to stay competitive and deliver exceptional experiences to their customers.
🌟 Ready to Future-Proof Your Startup?
Don’t wait for downtime to disrupt your growth. Start building observability into your systems today and gain the confidence to scale without fear. At Opswire, we specialise in helping startups implement cost-effective observability solutions tailored to your needs.
Schedule a free 30-minute consultation to discuss how we can help you achieve reliability and visibility from day one.