Digital Asset Monitoring and Observability: A Use Case

When discussing observability in technological solutions, we refer to the ability to monitor and understand a system’s internal state through metrics, traces, and logs.

Owing to observability, any company can collect, visualize, and analyze data from its applications and infrastructure, giving it a global view of its systems, from code to user experience.

Observability also allows companies to receive early alerts to resolve application availability and performance problems. This impacts both the end user and the business, preventing the adverse effects of issues such as prolonged service interruption.

An Automation-based Proprietary Artifact

Providing our partners with tools that facilitate the monitoring and observability of their digital assets is a fundamental part of our work at Pragma in Central America and other territories where we have been developing solutions for years.

Our experience has enabled us to create an artifact with which our partners can monitor their digital assets efficiently and automatically through infrastructure as code (IaC). 

With IaC, instead of manually setting servers, networks, and other infrastructure resources, we automate the provisioning and management of the tool we use for system monitoring. This means that in minutes, our partners can begin to enjoy the benefits of personalized dashboards and alerts to monitor the behavior of each service comprising the system.

Moreover, our artifact allows us to add new services and information sources quickly and easily. 

Monitoring Types

Depending on the approach, monitoring can provide valuable insights, both from a technical perspective and from a business point of view, leading to findings related to user experience.

• Infrastructure monitoring focuses on the components traditionally comprising a processing unit, such as memory, processor, disk, and processor data input and output. 
• Application Performance Management (APM) aims to understand an application’s components, including its various layers, such as front, middle, and application server. 
• Customer experience refers to services directly focused on end-users; therefore, it seeks to identify how they operate to realize their perception of our services. 
• Synthetic monitoring intends to simulate users’ actions in our system to identify whether the behavior is as expected.

Benefits of Observability: A Case Study for Financial Institutions

A prominent insurance company deployed a B2C application as a gateway for users to access e-commerce and product information.  

Thanks to our monitoring through AWS Cloudwatch, we can offer a monthly report on improvement opportunities based on the metrics analysis. For instance:

• We found that the workload could be reduced by approximately 65 % in non-production environments, specifically development and QA. This significant change streamlined processes and resulted in considerable savings in infrastructure costs.

• We identified an opportunity to increase the system’s availability and robustness by implementing Auto Scaling on the EC2 instances that support the ECS cluster. This strategy not only ensures higher availability by dynamically adjusting the number of EC2 instances based on demand but also strengthens fault tolerance in production environments, ensuring more stable and continuous operation.

• A review of the data collected revealed a chance to strengthen our security practices. In response, we have taken steps to protect our data stores, including improving the security of stored information.

This use case shows us how service observability can help improve decision-making. Another typical case involves changes in database workloads. In these situations, whether due to an excess or a deficit of load, monitoring allows the capacity of each instance to be resized, which facilitates cost optimization. 

Monitoring’s ability to impact each pillar of the Well-Architected Framework is even more relevant. The information extracted about the system’s performance can give us insights into improving the safety, reliability, efficiency, sustainability, and operational excellence of the digital asset we are monitoring. 

Are you looking for a partner to build comprehensive solutions that range from infrastructure to user experience?