Why Observability tools are important when using IaC

In recent years, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has become an increasingly popular approach for managing cloud-based infrastructure with tools such as Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, and Pulumi.

Those tools allow developers to define infrastructure resources using code that enables them to use all the capabilities of code, such as versioning, automation deployment, and policies. However, with the growing complexity of cloud architecture, it is challenging to monitor and debug issues in real-time, such as CPU spikes or number of requests.

Observability is the ability to understand how a system behaves internally based on its external outputs. In other words, it's the practice of instrumenting a system to expose its internal state in a way that is observable and understandable. Observability is essential for any system to detect and resolve issues quickly, where downtime can be costly.

For example, you've defined your infrastructure resources and deployed them using a tool like Terraform. Terraform will let you know all resources have been deployed successfully, but there are no checks to validate the health of those resources over time. 

If, after time, you notice that the application response time is increasing, and customers are complaining about slow performance and bad user experience. With an observability tool, you can quickly identify the issue by inspecting application logs and traces and correlating them to your infrastructure changes.

You may discover that one of the infrastructure resources, such as a load balancer, some of the virtual machines, or your application’s database is not scaling properly, leading to increased response time. By identifying the issue quickly, you can adjust the IaC code to make changes to the infrastructure resources and redeploy the resources with minimal downtime.

Using a full-stack observability platform with IaC provides several benefits. 

• It enables teams to detect and resolve issues quickly, reducing the impact on customers and the company. 
• It provides a holistic view of the system, enabling teams to monitor both application and infrastructure metrics in one place and understand the system in an end-to-end manner. 
• And, it allows teams to make data-driven decisions when optimizing infrastructure resources, leading to better performance and cost savings.

With env0, you can forward all env0 deployment logs to one of the supported observability platforms by going to the organization settings -> Integration -> Log Forwarding and selecting the relevant platform you are using. Doing so will allow the platform to collect logs and data from env0, and you can immediately get to observing what’s really happening under the covers of your deployed application.

In conclusion, using an observability product with IaC is essential for teams managing cloud-based infrastructure. It provides critical monitoring, tracing, and logging capabilities, enabling teams to detect and resolve issues quickly. With the growing complexity of cloud architecture, observability is becoming increasingly important, and using a product that can provide a holistic view of the system is key to optimizing performance and minimizing downtime.

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