Operate

Observability allows you to focus on meaningful data and understand your workload's interactions and output. By concentrating on essential insights and eliminating unnecessary data, you maintain a straightforward approach to understanding workload performance. It's essential not only to collect data but also to interpret it correctly. Define clear baselines, set appropriate alert thresholds, and actively monitor for any deviations. A shift in a key metric, especially when correlated with other data, can pinpoint specific problem areas. With observability, you're better equipped to foresee and address potential challenges, ensuring that your workload operates smoothly and meets business needs.

Successful operation of a workload is measured by the achievement of business and customer outcomes. Define expected outcomes, determine how success will be measured, and identify metrics that will be used in those calculations to determine if your workload and operations are successful. Operational health includes both the health of the workload and the health and success of the operations activities performed in support of the workload (for example, deployment and incident response). Establish metrics baselines for improvement, investigation, and intervention, collect and analyze your metrics, and then validate your understanding of operations success and how it changes over time. Use collected metrics to determine if you are satisfying customer and business needs, and identify areas for improvement.

Efficient and effective management of operational events is required to achieve operational excellence. This applies to both planned and unplanned operational events. Use established runbooks for well-understood events, and use playbooks to aid in investigation and resolution of issues. Prioritize responses to events based on their business and customer impact. Verify that if an alert is raised in response to an event, there is an associated process to run with a specifically identified owner. Define in advance the personnel required to resolve an event and include escalation processes to engage additional personnel, as it becomes necessary, based on urgency and impact. Identify and engage individuals with the authority to make a decision on courses of action where there will be a business impact from an event response not previously addressed.

Communicate the operational status of workloads through dashboards and notifications that are tailored to the target audience (for example, customer, business, developers, operations) so that they may take appropriate action, so that their expectations are managed, and so that they are informed when normal operations resume.

In AWS, you can generate dashboard views of your metrics collected from workloads and natively from AWS. You can leverage CloudWatch or third-party applications to aggregate and present business, workload, and operations level views of operations activities. AWS provides workload insights through logging capabilities including AWS X-Ray, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and VPC Flow Logs to identify workload issues in support of root cause analysis and remediation.

The following questions focus on these considerations for operational excellence.

OPS 8:  How do you utilize workload observability in your organization?
Ensure optimal workload health by leveraging observability. Utilize relevant metrics, logs, and traces to gain a comprehensive view of your workload's performance and address issues efficiently.

OPS 9:  How do you understand the health of your operations?
Define, capture, and analyze operations metrics to gain visibility to operations events so that you can take appropriate action.

OPS 10:  How do you manage workload and operations events?
Prepare and validate procedures for responding to events to minimize their disruption to your workload.

All of the metrics you collect should be aligned to a business need and the outcomes they support. Develop scripted responses to well-understood events and automate their performance in response to recognizing the event.