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Why is observability important for better security?
Observability, especially in the context of cloud-native applications, is important for several reasons. First and foremost is security. By design, cloud-native applications rely on multiple, dynamic, distributed, and highly ephemeral components or microservices, with each microservice operating and scaling independently to deliver the application functionality. In this type of microservices-based architecture, observability and metrics provide security insights that enable teams to identify and mitigate zero-day threats through the detection of anomalies in microservices metrics, such as traffic flow, process calls, syscalls, and more. Using machine learning (ML) and heuristic analysis, security teams can identify abnormal behavior and issue alerts.
Observability also enables security teams to visualize the blast radius in the event of a breach. Using this information, teams can apply mitigating controls, such as security policy updates, to isolate the breached microservice and thereby limit exposure.
And finally, observability helps DevOps teams maintain the quality of service by identifying service failure and performance hotspots, and conducting a detailed investigation with capabilities such as packet capture and distributed tracing.
Observability challenges
DevOps and SRE teams today are being overwhelmed by an enormous amount of data from multiple, disparate systems that monitor infrastructure and Continue reading