Get updates impacting your industry from our GigaOm Research Community I had the pleasure of producing my first analyst report in one of the hottest categories for GigaOm—cloud observability. Here are my thoughts on the research process, the technology space, and the vendors, as well as some advice for IT decision-makers. For those who have been living under the rock, who have never heard of observability, here’s a helpful excerpt from my report: Observability is an emerging set of practices, platforms, and tools that goes beyond monitoring to provide insight into the internal state of systems by analyzing external outputs. Monitoring has been a core function of IT for decades, but old approaches have become inadequate for a variety of reasons—cloud deployments, agile development methodology, continuous deployments, and new DevOps practices among them. These have changed the way systems, infrastructure, and applications need to be observed so events and incidents can be acted upon quickly. At the heart of the observability concept is a very basic premise: quickly learn what happens within your IT to avoid extended outages. And in the unfortunate event of an outage, you need to ensure that you can get to the root cause of it fast. Outages are measured by Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) and it is the goal of the observability concept to drive the MTTR value to as close to zero as possible.