Tag: Causality

In an article that I published nearly two years ago titled Are Humans Actually Underrated, I talked about how technology can be used to augment human intelligence to empower humans to work better, smarter and faster.

The notion that technology can enhance human capabilities is far from novel. Often termed Intelligence Augmentation, Intelligence Amplification, Cognitive Augmentation, or Machine Augmented Intelligence, this concept revolves around leveraging information technology to bolster human intellect. Its roots trace back to the 1950s and 60s, a testament to its enduring relevance.

From the humble mouse and graphical user interface to the ubiquitous iPhone and the cutting-edge advancements in Artificial Intelligence like ChatGPT, Intelligence Augmentation has been steadily evolving. These tools and platforms serve as tangible examples of how technology can be harnessed to augment our cognitive abilities and propel us towards greater efficiency and innovation.

An area of scientific development closely aligned with Intelligence Augmentation is the field of Causal Reasoning. Before diving into this, it’s essential to underscore the fundamental importance of causality. Understanding why things happen, not just what happened, is the cornerstone of effective problem-solving, decision-making, and innovation.

Humans Crave Causality

Our innate curiosity drives us to seek explanations for the world around us. This deep-rooted desire to understand cause-and-effect relationships is fundamental to human cognition. Here’s why:

Survival: At the most basic level it all boils down to survival. By understanding cause-and-effect, we can learn what actions lead to positive outcomes (food, shelter, safety) and avoid negative ones (danger, illness, death).

Learning: Understanding cause-and-effect is fundamental to learning and acquiring knowledge. We learn by observing and making connections between events, forming a mental model of how the world works.

Prediction: Being able to predict what will happen allows us to plan for the future and make informed choices. We can anticipate the consequences of our actions and prepare for them.

Problem-solving: Cause-and-effect is crucial for solving problems efficiently. By identifying the cause of an issue, we can develop solutions that address the root cause rather than just treating the symptoms.

Scientific Discovery: This innate desire to understand causality drives scientific inquiry. By seeking cause-and-effect relationships, we can unravel the mysteries of the universe and develop new technologies.

Technological Advancement: Technology thrives on our ability to understand cause-and-effect. From inventing tools to building machines, understanding how things work allows us to manipulate the world around us.

Societal Progress: When we understand the causes of social issues, we can develop solutions to address them. Understanding cause-and-effect fosters cooperation and allows us to build a better future for ourselves and future generations.

Understanding Cause & Effect In The Digital World

In the complex digital age, this craving for causality remains as potent as ever. Nowhere is this more evident than in the world of cloud native applications. These intricate systems, composed of interconnected microservices and distributed components, can be challenging to manage and troubleshoot. When things go wrong, pinpointing the root cause can be akin to searching for a needle in a haystack.

This is increasingly important today because so many businesses rely on modern applications and real time data to conduct their daily business. Delays, missing data and malfunctions can have a crippling effect on business processes and customer experiences which in turn can have significant financial consequences.

Understanding causality in this context is paramount. It’s the difference between reacting to symptoms and addressing the underlying issue. For instance, a sudden spike in error rates might be attributed to increased traffic. While this might be a contributing factor, the root cause could lie in a misconfigured database, a network latency issue, or a bug in a specific microservice. Without a clear understanding of the causal relationships between these components, resolving the problem becomes a matter of trial and error.

Today site reliability engineers (SREs) and developers, tasked with ensuring the reliability and performance of cloud native systems, rely heavily on causal reasoning. They do this by constructing mental models of how different system components interact, they attempt to anticipate potential failure points and develop strategies to mitigate risks.

When incidents occur, SREs and developers work together, employing a systematic approach to identify the causal chain, from the initial trigger to the eventual impact on users. We rely heavily on their  knowledge to implement effective remediation steps and prevent future occurrences.

In the intricate world of cloud native applications, where complexity reigns, this innate ability to connect cause and effect is essential for building resilient, high-performing systems.

The Crucial Role of Observability in Understanding Causality in Cloud Native Systems

OpenTelemetry and its ecosystem of observability tools provide a window into the complex world of cloud native systems. By collecting and analyzing vast amounts of data, engineers can gain valuable insights into system behavior. However, understanding why something happened – establishing causality – still remains a significant challenge.

The inability to rapidly pinpoint the root cause of issues is a costly affair. A recent PagerDuty customer survey revealed that the average time to resolve digital incidents is a staggering 175 minutes. This delay impacts service reliability, erodes customer satisfaction, revenue and consumes lots of engineering cycles in the process. A time-consuming process often leaves engineering teams overwhelmed and firefighting.

To drive substantial improvements in system reliability and performance, organizations must accelerate their ability to understand causality. This requires a fundamental shift in how we approach observability. By investing in advanced analytics that can reason about causality, we can empower engineers to quickly identify root causes and their effects so they can prioritize what is important and implement effective solutions.

Augmenting Human Ingenuity with Causal Reasoning

In this regard, causal reasoning software like Causely represent a quantum leap forward in the evolution of human-machine collaboration. By combining this capability with OpenTelemetry, the arduous task of causal reasoning can be automated, liberating SREs and developers from the firefighting cycle. Instead of being perpetually mired in troubleshooting, they can dedicate more cognitive resources to innovation and strategic problem-solving.

Imagine these professionals equipped with the ability to process vast quantities of observability data in mere seconds, unveiling intricate causal relationships that would otherwise remain hidden. This is the power of causal reasoning software that is built to amplify the processes associated with Reliability Engineering. They amplify human intelligence, transforming SREs and developers from reactive problem solvers into proactive architects of system reliability.

By accelerating incident resolution from today’s averages (175 minutes as documented in the PagerDuty’s customer survey) to mere minutes, these platforms not only enhance customer satisfaction but also unlock significant potential for business growth. With freed-up time, teams can focus on developing new features, improving system performance, and preventing future issues. Moreover, the insights derived from causal reasoning software can be leveraged to proactively identify vulnerabilities and optimize system performance, elevating the overall reliability and resilience of cloud native architectures.

The convergence of human ingenuity and machine intelligence, embodied in causal reasoning software, is ushering in a new era of problem-solving. This powerful combination enables us to tackle unprecedented challenges with unparalleled speed, accuracy, and innovation.

In the context of reliability engineering, the combination of OpenTelemetry and causal reasoning software offers a significant opportunity to accelerate progress towards continuous application reliability.

Related resources

• Read the blog: Explainability: The Black Box Dilemma in the Real World
• Watch the video: See how Causely leverages OpenTelemetry
• Take the interactive tour: Experience Causely first-hand

Digital disruptions have reached alarming levels. Incident response in modern application environments is frequent, time-consuming and labor intensive. Our team has first-hand experience dealing with the far-reaching impacts of these disruptions and outages, having spent decades in IT Ops.

PagerDuty recently published a study¹ that shines a light on how broken our existing incident response systems and practices are. The recent Crowdstrike debacle is further evidence of this. Even with all the investment in observability, AI Ops, automation, and playbooks, things aren’t improving. In some ways, they’re actually worse; we’re collecting more and more data and we’re overloaded with tooling, creating confusion between users and teams who struggle to understand the holistic environment and all of its interdependencies.

With a mean resolution time of 175 minutes, each customer-impacting digital incident costs both time and money. The industry needs to reset and revisit current processes so we can evolve and change the trajectory.

The impact of outages and application downtime

Outages erode customer trust. 90% of IT leaders report that disruptions have reduced customer confidence. Protecting sensitive data, ensuring swift service restoration, and providing real-time customer updates are essential for maintaining trust when digital incidents happen. Thorough, action-oriented postmortems are critical post-incident to prevent recurrences. And – at risk of reinforcing the obvious – IT organizations need to put operational practices in place to minimize outages from happening in the first place.

Yet even though IT leaders understand the implications on customer confidence, incident frequency continues to rise. 59% of IT leaders report an increase in customer-impacting incidents, and it’s not going to get better unless we change the way we observe and mitigate problems in our applications.

Automation can help, but adoption is slow

Despite the growing threat, many organizations are lagging behind in incident response automation:

• Over 70% of IT leaders report that key incident response tasks are not yet fully automated.
• 38% of responders’ time is spent dealing with manual incident response processes.
• Organizations with manual processes take on average 3 hours 58 minutes to resolve customer-impacting incidents, compared to 2 hours 40 minutes for those with automated processes.

It doesn’t take an IT expert to know that spending nearly half their time in manual processes is a waste of resources. And those that have automated operations are still taking almost 3 hours to resolve incidents. Why is incident response still so slow? 

It’s not just about process automation. We also need to accelerate decision automation, driven by a deep understanding of the state of applications and infrastructure.

Causal AI for DevOps: The missing link

Causal AI for DevOps promises a bridge between observability and automated incident response. By “Causal AI for DevOps,” I’m referring to causal reasoning software that applies machine learning to automatically capture cause and effect relationships. Causal AI has the potential to help Dev and Ops teams better plan for changes to code, configurations or load patterns, so they can stay focused on achieving service-level and business objectives instead of firefighting.

Source: PagerDuty

With Causal AI for DevOps, many of the incident response tasks that are currently manual can be automated:

• When service entities are degraded or failing and affecting other entities that make up business services, causal reasoning software surfaces the relationship between the problem and the symptoms it’s causing.
• The team with responsibility for the failing or degraded service is immediately notified so they can get to work resolving the problem. Some problems can be remediated automatically.
• Notifications can be sent to end users and other stakeholders, letting them know that their services are affected along with an explanation for why this occurred and when things will be back to normal.
• Postmortem documentation is automatically generated.
• There’s no more complex triage processes that would otherwise involve multiple teams and managers to orchestrate. Incidents and outages are reduced and root cause analysis is automated, so DevOps teams spend less time troubleshooting and more time shipping code.

Introducing Causely

This potential to transform the way DevOps teams work is why we built Causely. Our Causal Reasoning Platform automatically pinpoints the root cause of observed symptoms based on real-time, dynamic data across the entire application environment. Causely transforms incident response and improves mean time to resolution (MTTR), so DevOps teams focus on building new services and innovations that propel the business forward.

By automatically understanding cause-and-effect relationships in application environments, Causely also enables predictive maintenance and better overall operational resilience. It can help to prevent outages and identify the root cause of potential issues before they escalate.

Here’s how it works, at a high level:

1. Our Causal Reasoning Platform is shipped with out-of-the-box Causal Models that drive the platform’s behavior.
2. Once deployed, Causely automatically discovers the application environment and generates a Topology Graph of it.
3. A Causality Graph is generated by instantiating the Causal Models with the Topology Graph to reflect cause and effect relationships between the root causes and their symptoms, specific to that environment at that point in time.
4. A Codebook is generated from the Causality Graph.
5. Using the Codebook, our Causal Reasoning Platform automatically and continuously pinpoints the root cause of issues.

Users can dig into incidents, understand their root causes, take remediation steps, and proactively plan for new releases and application changes – all within Causely.

This decreases downtime, enhances operational efficiency, and improves customer trust long-term.

It’s time for a new approach

It’s time to shift from manual to automated incident response. Causal AI for DevOps can help teams prevent outages, reduce risk, cut costs, and build sustainable customer trust.

Don’t hesitate to contact us about how to bring automation into your organization, or you can see Causely for yourself.

¹ “Customer impacting incidents increased by 43% during the past year- each incident costs nearly $800,000.” PagerDuty. (2024, June 26). https://www.pagerduty.com/resources/learn/cost-of-downtime/ 

Related resources

• Read the blog: DevOps may have cheated death, but do we all need to work for the king of the underworld?
• Learn about our Causal Reasoning Platform
• See Causely for yourself

The software industry is at a crossroads. I believe those who embrace explainability as a key part of their strategy will emerge as leaders. Those who resist will risk losing customer confidence and market share. The time for obfuscation is over. The era of explainability has begun.

What Is The Black Box Dilemma?

Imagine a masterful illusionist, their acts so breathtakingly deceptive that the secrets behind them remain utterly concealed. Today’s software is much the same. We marvel at its abilities to converse, diagnose, drive, and defend, yet the inner workings often remain shrouded in mystery. This is often referred to as the “black box” problem.

The recent CrowdStrike incident is also a stark reminder of the risks of this opacity. A simple software update, intended to enhance security, inadvertently caused widespread system crashes. It’s as if the magician’s assistant accidentally dropped the secret prop, revealing the illusion for what it truly was – an error prone process with no resilience. Had organizations understood the intricacies of CrowdStrike’s software release process, they might have been better equipped to mitigate risks and prevent the disruptions that followed.

This incident, coupled with the rapid advancements in AI, underscores the critical importance of explainability. Understanding the entire lifecycle of software – from conception to operation – is no longer optional but imperative. It is the cornerstone of trust, a shield against catastrophic failures, and an important foundation for accountability.

As our world becomes increasingly reliant on complex systems, understanding their inner workings is no longer a luxury but a necessity. Explainability acts as a key to unlocking the black box, revealing the logic and reasoning behind complex outputs. By shedding light on the decision-making processes of software, AI, and other sophisticated systems, we foster trust, accountability, and a deeper comprehension of their impact.

The Path Forward: Cultivating Explainability in Software

Achieving explainability demands a comprehensive approach that addresses several critical dimensions.

• Software Centric Reasoning and Ethical Considerations: Can the system’s decision-making process be transparently articulated, justified, and aligned with ethical principles? Explainability is essential for building trust and ensuring that systems used to support decision making operate fairly and responsibly.
• Effective Communication and User Experience: Is the system able to communicate its reasoning clearly and understandably to both technical and non-technical audiences? Effective communication enhances collaboration, knowledge sharing, and user satisfaction by empowering users to make informed decisions.
• Robust Data Privacy and Security: How can sensitive information be protected while preserving the transparency necessary for explainability? Rigorous data handling and protection are crucial for safeguarding privacy and maintaining trust in the system.
• Regulatory Compliance and Continuous Improvement: Can the system effectively demonstrate adherence to relevant regulations and industry standards for explainability? Explainability is a dynamic process requiring ongoing evaluation, refinement, and adaptation to stay aligned with the evolving regulatory landscape.

By prioritizing these interconnected elements, software vendors and engineering teams can create solutions where explainability is not merely a feature, but a cornerstone of trust, reliability, and competitive advantage.

An Example of Explainability in Action with Causely

Causely is a pioneer in applying causal reasoning to revolutionize cloud-native application reliability. Our platform empowers operations teams to rapidly identify and resolve the root causes of service disruptions, preventing issues before they impact business processes and customers. The enables dramatic reductions in Mean Time to Repair (MTTR), minimizing business disruptions and safeguarding customer experiences.

Causely also uses its Causal Reasoning Platform to manage its SaaS offering, detecting and responding to service disruptions, and ensuring swift resolution with minimal impact. You can learn more about this in Endre Sara‘s article “Eating Our Own Dogfood: Causely’s Journey with OpenTelemetry & Causal AI”.

Causal Reasoning, often referred to as Causal AI, is a specialized field in computer science dedicated to uncovering the underlying cause-and-effect relationships within complex data. As the foundation of explainable AI, it surpasses the limitations of traditional statistical methods, which frequently produce misleading correlations.

Unlike opaque black-box models, causal reasoning illuminates the precise mechanisms driving outcomes, providing transparent and actionable insights. When understanding the why behind an event is equally important as predicting the what, causal reasoning offers superior clarity and reliability.

By understanding causation, we transcend mere observation to gain predictive and interventional power over complex systems.

Causely is built on a deep-rooted foundation of causal reasoning. The founding team, pioneers in applying this science to IT operations, led the charge at System Management Arts (SMARTS). SMARTS revolutionized root cause analysis for distributed systems and networks, empowering more than 1500 global enterprises and service providers to ensure the reliability of mission-critical IT services. Their groundbreaking work earned industry accolades and solidified SMARTS as a leader in the field.

Explainability is a cornerstone of the Causal Reasoning Platform from Causely. The company is committed to transparently communicating how its software arrives at its conclusions, encompassing both the underlying mechanisms used in Causal Reasoning and the practical application within organizations operational workflows.

Explainable Operations: Enhancing Workflow Efficiency for Continuous Application Reliability

Causely converts raw observability data into actionable insights by pinpointing root causes and their cascading effects within complex application and infrastructure environments.

Today incident response is a complex, resource-intensive process of triage and troubleshooting that often diverts critical teams from strategic initiatives. This reactive approach hampers innovation, erodes efficiency, and can lead to substantial financial losses and reputational damage, when application reliability is not continuously assured.

The complex interconnected nature of cloud-native environments magnifies the effect/impact, leading to cascading disruptions, which can propagate across services when Root Cause problems occur.

By automating the identification and explanation of cause-and-effect relationships, Causely accelerates incident response. Relevant teams responsible for root cause problems receive immediate alerts, complete with detailed explanations of the cause & effect, empowering them to prioritize remediation based on impact. Simultaneously, teams whose services are impacted gain insights into the root causes and who is responsible for resolution, enabling proactive risk mitigation without the need for extensive troubleshooting.

For certain types of Root Cause problems it may also be possible to automate the remediation when they occur without human intervention.

By maintaining historical records of the cause and effect of past Root Cause problems and identifying recurring patterns, Causely enables reliability engineering teams to anticipate future potential problems and implement targeted mitigation strategies.

Causely’s ability to explain the effect of potential degradations and failures, before they even happen through “what if” analysis, also empowers reliability engineering teams to identify single points of failure, changes in load patterns and assess the impact of planned changes on related applications, business processes, and customers.

The result? Through explainability organizations can dramatically reduce MTTR, improve business continuity, and increase cycles for development and innovation. Causely turns reactive troubleshooting into proactive prevention, ensuring application reliability can be continuously assured. This short video tells the story.

Unveiling Causely: How Our Platform Delivers Actionable Insights

Given the historical challenges and elusive nature of automating root cause analysis in IT operations, customer skepticism is warranted in this field. This problem has long been considered the “holy grail” of the industry, with countless vendors falling short of delivering a viable solution.

As a consequence Causely has found that it is important to prioritize transparency and explainability around how our Causal Reasoning Platform works and produces the results described earlier.

Much has been written about this — learn more here.

This is an approach which is grounded in sound scientific principles, making it both effective and comprehensible.

Beyond understanding how the platform works, customers also value transparency around data handling. In this regard our approach to data management offers unique benefits in terms of data privacy and data management cost savings. You can learn more about this here.

In Summary

Explainability is the cornerstone of Causely’s mission. As they advance their technology, their dedication to transparency and understanding will only grow stronger. Don’t hesitate to visit the website or reach out to me or members of the Causely team to learn more about the approach and to experience Causely firsthand.

Imagine a world where user experiences adapt to you in real time. Personalized recommendations appear before you even think of them, updates happen instantaneously, and interactions flow seamlessly. This captivating world is powered by real-time data, the lifeblood of modern applications.

But this power comes at a cost. The intricate architecture behind real-time services can make troubleshooting issues a nightmare. Organizations that rely on real-time data to deliver products and services face a critical challenge: ensuring data is delivered fresh and on time. Missing data or delays can cripple the user experience and demand resolutions within minutes, if not seconds.

This article delves into the world of real-time data challenges. We’ll explore the business settings where real-time data is king, highlighting the potential consequences of issues. Then I will introduce a novel approach that injects automation into the troubleshooting process, saving valuable time and resources, but most importantly mitigating the business impact when problems arise.

Lags & Missing Data: The Hidden Disruptors Across Industries

Lags and missing data can be silent assassins, causing unseen disruptions that ripple through various industries. Let’s dig into the specific ways these issues can impact different business sectors.

Financial markets

• Trading: In high-frequency trading, even milliseconds of delay can mean the difference between a profitable and losing trade. Real-time data on market movements is crucial for making informed trading decisions.
• Fraud detection: Real-time monitoring of transactions allows financial institutions to identify and prevent fraudulent activity as it happens. Delays in data can give fraudsters a window of opportunity.
• Risk management: Real-time data on market volatility, creditworthiness, and other factors helps businesses assess and manage risk effectively. Delays can lead to inaccurate risk assessments and potentially large losses.

Supply chain management

• Inventory management: Real-time data on inventory levels helps businesses avoid stockouts and optimize inventory costs. Delays can lead to overstocking or understocking, impacting customer satisfaction and profitability.
• Logistics and transportation: Real-time tracking of shipments allows companies to optimize delivery routes, improve efficiency, and provide accurate delivery estimates to customers. Delays can disrupt logistics and lead to dissatisfied customers.
• Demand forecasting: Real-time data on customer behavior and sales trends allows businesses to forecast demand accurately. Delays can lead to inaccurate forecasts and production issues.

Customer service

• Live chat and phone support: Real-time access to customer data allows support agents to personalize interactions and resolve issues quickly. Delays can lead to frustration and longer resolution times.
• Social media monitoring: Real-time tracking of customer sentiment on social media allows businesses to address concerns and build brand reputation. Delays can lead to negative feedback spreading before it’s addressed.
• Personalization: Real-time data on customer preferences allows businesses to personalize website experiences, product recommendations, and marketing campaigns. Delays can limit the effectiveness of these efforts.

Manufacturing

• Machine monitoring: Real-time monitoring of machine performance allows for predictive maintenance, preventing costly downtime. Delays can lead to unexpected breakdowns and production delays.
• Quality control: Real-time data on product quality allows for immediate identification and correction of defects. Delays can lead to defective products reaching customers.
• Process optimization: Real-time data on production processes allows for continuous improvement and optimization. Delays can limit the ability to identify and address inefficiencies.

Other examples

• Online gaming: Real-time data is crucial for smooth gameplay and a fair playing field. Delays can lead to lag, disconnects, and frustration for players.
• Healthcare: Real-time monitoring of vital signs and patient data allows for faster diagnosis and treatment. Delays can have serious consequences for patient care.
• Energy management: Real-time data on energy consumption allows businesses and utilities to optimize energy use and reduce costs. Delays can lead to inefficient energy usage and higher costs.
• Cybersecurity: Real-time data is the backbone of modern cybersecurity, enabling rapid threat detection, effective incident response, and accurate security analytics. However, delays in the ability to see and understand this data can create critical gaps in your defenses. From attackers having more time to exploit vulnerabilities to outdated security controls and hindered automated responses, data lags can significantly compromise your ability to effectively combat cyber threats.

As we’ve seen, the consequences of lags and missing data can be far-reaching. From lost profits in financial markets to frustrated customers and operational inefficiencies, these issues pose a significant threat to business success. Having the capability to identify the root cause, impact and remediate issues with precision and speed is an imperative to mitigate the business impact.

Causely  automatically captures cause and effect relationships based on real-time, dynamic data across the entire application environment. Request a demo to see it in action.

The Delicate Dance: A Web of Services and Hidden Culprits

Modern user experiences that leverage real-time data rely on complex chains of interdependent services – a delicate dance of microservices, databases, messaging platforms, and virtualized compute infrastructure. A malfunction in any one element can create a ripple effect, impacting the freshness and availability of data for users. This translates to frustrating delays, lags, or even complete UX failures.

Let’s delve into the hidden culprits behind these issues and see how seemingly minor bottlenecks can snowball into major UX problems:

Slowdown Domino with Degraded Microservice

• Scenario: A microservice responsible for product recommendations experiences high latency due to increased user traffic and internal performance degradation (e.g., memory leak, code inefficiency).
• Impact 1: The overloaded and degraded microservice takes significantly longer to process requests and respond to the database.
• Impact 2: The database, waiting for the slow microservice response, experiences delays in retrieving product information.
• Impact 3: Due to the degradation, the microservice might also have issues sending messages efficiently to the message queue. These messages contain updates on product availability, user preferences, or other relevant data for generating recommendations.
• Impact 4: Messages pile up in the queue due to slow processing by the microservice, causing delays in delivering updates to other microservices responsible for presenting information to the user.
• Impact 5: The cache, not receiving timely updates from the slow microservice and the message queue, relies on potentially outdated data.
• User Impact: Users experience significant delays in seeing product recommendations. The recommendations themselves might be inaccurate or irrelevant due to outdated data in the cache, hindering the user experience and potentially leading to missed sales opportunities. Additionally, users might see inconsistencies between product information displayed on different pages (due to some parts relying on the cache and others waiting for updates from the slow microservice).

Message Queue Backup

• Scenario: A sudden spike in user activity overwhelms the message queue handling communication between microservices.
• Impact 1: Messages pile up in the queue, causing delays in communication between microservices.
• Impact 2: Downstream microservices waiting for messages experience delays in processing user actions.
• Impact 3: The cache, not receiving updates from slow microservices, might provide outdated information.
• User Impact: Users experience lags in various functionalities – for example, slow loading times for product pages, delayed updates in shopping carts, or sluggish responsiveness when performing actions.

Cache Miss Cascade

• Scenario: A cache experiences a high rate of cache misses due to frequently changing data (e.g., real-time stock availability).
• Impact 1: The microservice needs to constantly retrieve data from the database, increasing the load on the database server.
• Impact 2: The database, overloaded with requests from the cache, experiences performance degradation.
• Impact 3: The slow database response times further contribute to cache misses, creating a feedback loop.
• User Impact: Users experience frequent delays as the system struggles to retrieve data for every request, leading to a sluggish and unresponsive user experience.

Kubernetes Lag

• Scenario: A resource bottleneck occurs within the Kubernetes cluster, limiting the processing power available to microservices.
• Impact 1: Microservices experience slow response times due to limited resources.
• Impact 2: Delays in microservice communication and processing cascade throughout the service chain.
• Impact 3: The cache might become stale due to slow updates, and message queues could experience delays.
• User Impact: Users experience lags across various functionalities, from slow page loads and unresponsive buttons to delayed updates in real-time data like stock levels or live chat messages.

Even with advanced monitoring tools, pinpointing the root cause of these and other issues can be a time-consuming detective hunt. The triage & troubleshooting process often requires a team effort, bringing together experts from various disciplines. Together, they sift through massive amounts of observability data – traces, metrics, logs, and the results of diagnostic tests – to piece together the evidence and draw the right conclusions so they can accurately determine the cause and effect. The speed and accuracy of the process is very much determined by the skills of the available resources when issues arise

Only when the root cause is understood can the responsible team make informed decisions to resolve the problem and restore reliable service.

Transforming Incident Response: Automation of the Triage & Troubleshooting Process

Traditional methods of incident response, often relying on manual triage and troubleshooting, can be slow, inefficient, and prone to human error. This is where automation comes in, particularly with the advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Specifically, a subfield of AI called Causal AI presents a revolutionary approach to transforming incident response.

Causal AI goes beyond correlation, directly revealing cause-and-effect relationships between incidents and their root causes. In an environment where services rely on real-time data and fast resolution is critical, Causal AI offers significant benefits:

• Automated Triage: Causal AI analyzes alerts and events to prioritize incidents based on severity and impact. It can also pinpoint the responsible teams, freeing resources from chasing false positives.
• Machine Speed Root Cause Identification: By analyzing causal relationships, Causal AI quickly identifies the root cause, enabling quicker remediation and minimizing damage.
• Smarter Decisions: A clear understanding of the causal chain empowers teams to make informed decisions for efficient incident resolution.

Causely is leading the way in applying Causal AI to incident response for modern cloud-native applications. Causely’s technology utilizes causal reasoning to automate triage and troubleshooting, significantly reducing resolution times and mitigating business impact. Additionally, Causal AI streamlines post-incident analysis by automatically documenting the causal chain.

Beyond reactive incident response, Causal AI offers proactive capabilities that focus on measures to reduce the probability of future incidents and service disruptions, through improved hygiene, predictions and “what if” analysis.

The solution is built for the modern world that incorporates real-time data, applications that communicate synchronously and asynchronously, and leverage modern cloud building blocks (databases, caching, messaging & streaming platforms and Kubernetes).

This is just the beginning of the transformative impact Causal AI is having on incident response. As the technology evolves, we can expect even more advancements that will further streamline and strengthen organizations’ ability to continuously assure the reliability of applications.

If you would like to learn more about Causal AI and its applications in the world of real-time data and cloud-native applications, don’t hesitate to reach out.

You may also want to check out an article by Endre Sara which explains how Causely is using Causely to manage its own SaaS service, which is built around a real-time data architecture.

Related Resources

• Watch the on-demand webinar: What is Causal AI and why do DevOps teams need it?
• Read the blog: Bridging the gap between observability and automation with causal reasoning
• See causal AI in action: Request a demo of Causely

Can AI-powered causality crack the RCA code for cloud-native applications?

The idea of applying AI to determine causality in an automated Root Cause Analysis solution sounds like the Holy Grail, but it’s easier said than done. There’s a lot of misinformation surrounding RCA solutions. This article cuts the confusion and provides a clear picture. I will outline the essential functionalities needed for automated root cause analysis. Not only will I define these capabilities, I will also showcase some examples to demonstrate their impact.

By the end, you’ll have a clearer understanding of what a robust RCA solution powered by causal AI can offer and how it can empower your IT team to better navigate the complexities of your cloud-native environment and most importantly dramatically reduce MTTx.

The Rise (and Fall) of the Automated Root Cause Analysis Holy Grail

Modern organizations are tethered to technology. IT systems, once monolithic and predictable, have fractured into a dynamic web of cloud-native applications. This shift towards agility and scalability has come at a cost: unprecedented complexity.

Troubleshooting these intricate ecosystems is a constant struggle for DevOps teams. Pinpointing the root cause of performance issues and malfunctions can feel like navigating a labyrinth – a seemingly endless path of interconnected components, each with the potential to be the culprit.

For years, automating Root Cause Analysis (RCA) has been the elusive “Holy Grail” for service assurance, as the business consequences of poorly performing systems are undeniable, especially as organizations become increasingly reliant on digital platforms.

Despite its importance, commercially available solutions for automated RCA remain scarce. While some hyperscalers and large enterprises have the resources and capital to attempt to develop in-house solutions to address the challenge (like Capital One’s example), these capabilities are out of reach for most organizations.

See how Causely can help your organization eliminate human troubleshooting. Request a demo of the Causal AI platform. 

Beyond Service Status: Unraveling the Cause-and-Effect Relations in Cloud Native Applications

Highly distributed systems, regardless of technology, are vulnerable to failures that cascade and impact interconnected components. Cloud-native environments, due to their complex web of dependencies, are especially prone to this domino effect. Imagine a single malfunction in a microservice, triggering chain reaction, disrupting related microservices. Similarly, a database issue can ripple outwards, affecting its clients and in turn everything that relies on them.

The same applies to infrastructure services like Kubernetes, Kafka, and RabbitMQ. Problems in these platforms might not always be immediately obvious because of the symptoms they cause within their domain. Furthermore symptoms manifest themselves within applications they support. The problem can then propagate further to related applications, creating a situation where the root cause problem and the symptoms they cause are separated by several layers.

Although many observability tools offer maps and graphs to visualize infrastructure and application health, these can become overwhelming during service disruptions and outages. While a sea of red icons in a topology map might highlight one or more issues, they fail to illuminate cause-and-effect relationships. Users are then left to decipher the complex interplay of problems and symptoms to work out the root cause. This is even harder to decipher when multiple root causes are present that have overlapping symptoms.

While topology maps show the status of services, they leave their users to interpret cause & effect

In addition to topology based correlation, DevOps team may also have experience of other types of correlation including event deduplication, time based correlation and path based analysis all of which attempt to reduce the noise in observability data. Don’t loose sight of the fact that this is not root cause analysis, just correlation, and correlation does not equal causation. This subject is covered further in a previous article I published Unveiling The Causal Revolution in Observability.

The Holy Grail of troubleshooting lies in understanding causality. Moving beyond topology maps and graphs, we need solutions that represent causality depicting the complex chains of cause-and-effect relationships, with clear lines of responsibility. Precise root cause identification that clearly explains the relationship between root causes and the symptoms they cause, spanning the technology domains that support application service composition, empowers DevOps teams to:

• Accelerate Resolution: By pinpointing the exact source of the issue and the symptoms that are caused by this, responsible teams are notified instantly and can prioritize fixes based on a clear understanding of the magnitude of the problem. This laser focus translates to faster resolution times.
• Minimize Triage: Teams managing impacted services are spared the burden of extensive troubleshooting. They can receive immediate notification of the issue’s origin, impact, and ownership, eliminating unnecessary investigation and streamlining recovery.
• Enhance Collaboration: With a clear understanding of complex chains of cause-and-effect relationships, teams can collaborate more effectively. The root cause owner can concentrate on fixing the issue, while impacted service teams can implement mitigating measures to minimize downstream effects.
• Automate Responses: Understanding cause and effect is also an enabler for automated workflows. This might include automatically notifying relevant teams through collaboration tools, notification systems and the service desk, as well as triggering remedial actions based on the identified problem.

Bringing This To Life With Real World Examples

The following examples will showcase the concept of causality relations, illustrating the precise relationships between root cause problems and the symptoms they trigger in interrelated components that make up application services.

This knowledge is crucial for several reasons. First, it allows for targeted notifications. By understanding the cause-and-effect sequences, the right teams can be swiftly alerted when issues arise, enabling faster resolution. Second, service owners impacted by problems can pinpoint the responsible parties. This clarity empowers them to take mitigating actions within their own services whenever possible and not waste time troubleshooting issues that fall outside of their area of responsibility.

Infra Problem Impacting Multiple Services

In this example, a CPU congestion in a Kubernetes Pod is the root cause and this causes symptoms –  high latency – in application services that it is hosting. In turn, this results in high latency on other applications services. In this situation the causal relationships are clearly explained.

Causality graph generated by Causely

A Microservice Hiccup Leads to Consumer Lag

Imagine you’re relying on a real-time data feed, but the information you see is outdated. In this scenario, a bug within a microservice (the data producer) disrupts its ability to send updates. This creates a backlog of events, causing downstream consumers (the services that use the data) to fall behind. As a result, users/customers end up seeing stale data, impacting the overall user experience and potentially leading to inaccurate decisions. Very often the first time DevOps find out about these types of issues is when end users and customers complain about the service experience.

Causality graph generated by Causely

Database Problems

In this example the clients of a database are experiencing performance issues because one of the clients is issuing queries that are particularly resource-intensive. Symptoms of this include:

• Slow query response times: Other queries submitted to the database take a significantly longer time to execute.
• Increased wait times for resources: Applications using the database experience high error rate as they wait for resources like CPU or disk access that are being heavily utilized by the resource-intensive queries.
• Database connection timeouts: If the database becomes overloaded due to the resource-intensive queries, applications might experience timeouts when trying to connect.

Causality graph generated by Causely

Summing Up

Cloud-native systems bring agility and scalability, but troubleshooting can be a nightmare. Here’s what you need to conquer Root Cause Analysis (RCA) in this complex world:

• Automated Analysis: Move beyond time-consuming manual RCA. Effective solutions automate data collection and analysis to pinpoint cause-and-effect relationships swiftly.
• Causal Reasoning: Don’t settle for mere correlations. True RCA tools understand causal chains, clearly and accurately explaining “why” things happen and the impact that they have.
• Dynamic Learning: Cloud-native environments are living ecosystems. RCA solutions must continuously learn and adapt to maintain accuracy as the landscape changes.
• Abstraction: Cut through the complexity. Effective RCA tools provide a clear view, hiding unnecessary details and highlighting crucial troubleshooting information.
• Time Travel:Post incident analysis requires clear explanations. Go back in time to understand “why” problems and understand the impact they had.
• Hypothesis: Understand the impact that degradation or failures in application services and infrastructure will have before they happen.

These capabilities unlock significant benefits:

• Faster Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR): Get back to business quickly.
• More Efficient Use Of Resources: Eliminate wasted time chasing the symptoms of problems and get to the root cause immediately.
• Free Up Expert Resources From Troubleshooting: Empower less specialized teams to take ownership of the work.
• Improved Collaboration: Foster teamwork because everyone understands the cause-and-effect chain.
• Reduced Costs & Disruptions: Save money and minimize business interruptions.
• Enhanced Innovation & Employee Satisfaction: Free up resources for innovation and create a smoother work environment.
• Improved Resilience: Take action now to prevent problems that could impact application performance and availability in the future

If you would like to get to avoid the glitter of “Fools Gold” and get to the Holy Grail of service assurance with automated Root Cause Analysis don’t hesitate to reach out to me directly, or contact the team at Causely today to discuss your challenges and discover how they can help you.

Related Resources

• Request a demo of the Causal AI platform from Causely
• Check out the podcast interview: Dr. Shmuel Kliger on Causely, Causal AI, and the Challenging Journey to Application Health
• Read the blog: Unveiling the Causal Revolution in Observability

As organizations transform their IT applications and adopt cloud-native architectures, scaling seamlessly while minimizing resource overheads becomes critical. DevOps teams can play a pivotal role in achieving this by embracing automation across various facets of the service delivery process.

Automation shines in areas such as infrastructure provisioning and scaling, continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), testing, security and compliance, but the practice of automated root cause analysis remains elusive.

While automation aids observability data collection and data correlation, understanding the relationships between cause and effect still requires the judgment and expertise of skilled personnel. This work falls on the shoulders of developers and SREs who have to manually decode the signals – from metrics, traces and logs – in order to get to the root cause when the performance of services degrades.

Individual incidents can take hours and even days to troubleshoot, demanding significant resources from multiple teams. The consistency of the process can also vary greatly depending on the skills that are available when these situations occur.

Service disruptions can also have significant financial consequences. Negative customer experiences directly impact revenue, and place an additional resource burden on the business functions responsible for appeasing unhappy customers. Depending on the industry you operate in and the type of services you provide, service disruptions may result in costly chargebacks and fines, making mitigation even more crucial.

Quantifying the load of manual root cause analysis on IT teams

Shining a Light on the Root Cause Analysis Problem in DevOps

While decomposing applications into microservices through the adoption of cloud-native architectures has enabled DevOps teams to increase the velocity with which they can release new functionality, it has also created a new set of operational challenges that have a significant impact on ongoing operational expenses and service reliability.

Increased complexity: With more services comes greater complexity, more moving parts, and more potential interactions that can lead to issues. This means diagnosing the root cause of problems becomes more difficult and time-consuming.

Distributed knowledge: In cloud-native environments, knowledge about different services often resides in different teams, who have limited knowledge of the wider system architecture. As the number of services scales, finding the right experts and getting them to collaborate on troubleshooting problems becomes more challenging. This adds to the time and effort required to coordinate and carry out root cause analysis and post incident analysis.  

Service proliferation fuels troubleshooting demands: Expanding your service landscape, whether through new services or simply additional instances, inevitably amplifies troubleshooting needs which translate into more resource requirements in DevOps teams for troubleshooting overtime.

Testing regimes cannot cover all scenarios: DevOps, with its CI/CD approach, releases frequent updates to individual services. This agility can reveal unforeseen interactions or behavioral changes in production, leading to service performance issues. While rollbacks provide temporary relief, identifying the root cause is crucial. Traditional post-rollback investigations might fall short due to unreproducible scenarios. Instead, real-time root cause analysis of these situations as they happen is important to ensure swift fixes and prevent future occurrences.

Telling the Story with Numbers

As cloud-native services scale, troubleshooting demands also grow exponentially, in a similar way to compounding interest on a savings account. As service footprints expand, more DevOps cycles are consumed by troubleshooting versus delivering new code, creating barriers to innovation. Distributed ownership and unclear escalation paths can also mask the escalating time that is consumed by troubleshooting. 

Below is a simple model that can be customized with company-specific data to illustrate the challenge in numbers. This model helps paint a picture of the current operational costs associated with troubleshooting. It also demonstrates how these are going to escalate over time, driven by the growth in cloud-native services (more microservices, serverless functions, etc).   

The model also illustrates the impact of efficiency gains through automation versus the current un-optimized state. The gap highlights the size of the opportunity available to create more cycles for productive development while reducing the need for additional headcount into the future, by automating troubleshooting.

This model illustrates the costs and impact of efficiency gains that can be achieved through automated root cause analysis

Beyond the cost of human capital, there are a number of other costs that have a direct impact on troubleshooting costs. These include the escalating costs of infrastructure and third-party SaaS services, dedicated to the management of observability data. These are well publicized and highlighted in a recent article published by Causely Founding Engineer Endre Sara that discusses avoiding the pitfalls of escalating costs when building out Causely’s own SaaS offering.

While DevOps have a cost, they pale in comparison to the financial consequences of service disruptions. With automated root cause analysis, DevOps teams can mitigate these risks, saving the business time, money and reputation. 

Future iterations of the model will account for these additional dimensions. 

If you would like to put your data to work and see the quantifiable benefits of automated root cause analysis in numbers, complete the short form to get started. 

Translating Theory into Reality

Did you know companies like Meta and Capital One automate root cause analysis in devops, achieving 50% faster troubleshooting? However, the custom solutions built by these industry giants require vast resources and deep expertise in data science to build and maintain, putting automated root cause analysis capabilities out of reach for most companies.

The team at Causely are changing this dynamic. Armed with decades of experience –  applying AI to the management of distributed systems, networks, and application resource management – they offer a powerful SaaS solution that removes the roadblocks to automated root cause analysis in DevOps environments. The Causely solution enables

• Clear, explainable insights: Instead of receiving many notifications when issues arise, teams receive clear notifications that explain the root cause along with the symptoms that led to these conclusions.
• Faster resolution times: Teams can get straight to work on problem resolution and even automate resolutions, versus spending time diagnosing problems.
• Business impact reduction: Problems can be prevented, early in their cycle, from escalating into critical situations that might otherwise have resulted in significant business disruption.
• Clearer communication & collaboration: RCA pinpoints issue owners, reducing triage time and wasted efforts from other teams.
• Simplified post-incident analysis: All of the knowledge about the cause and effect of prior problems is stored and available to simplify the process of post incident analysis and learning.

Wrapping Up

In this article we discussed the key challenges associated with troubleshooting and highlighted the cost implications of today’s approach. Addressing these issues is important because the business consequences of today’s approach are significant.

1. Troubleshooting is costly because it consumes the time of skilled resources.
2. Troubleshooting steals time from productive activities which impacts the ability of DevOps to deliver new capabilities.
3. Service disruptions have business consequences: The longer they persist, the bigger the impact to customers and business.

If you don’t clearly understand your future resource requirements and costs associated with troubleshooting as you scale out cloud-native services, the model we’ve developed provides a simple way to capture this.

Want to see quantifiable benefits from automated root cause analysis?

Turn “The Optimized Mode of Operation” in the model from vision to reality with Causely.

The Causely service enables you to measure and showcase the impact of automating RCA in your organization. Through improved service performance and availability, faster resolution times, and improved team efficiency, the team will show you the “art of the possible.”

Related Resources

• Watch the video: Mission Impossible: Cracking the Code of Complex Tracing Data
• Read the blog: Eating Our Own Dog Food: Causely’s Journey with OpenTelemetry & Causal AI
• Request a demo: See Causely in action

Reposted with permission from LinkedIn. 

Modernization Of The RCA Process

Over the past month, I have spent a significant amount of time researching what vendors and customers are doing in the devops space to streamline the process of root cause analysis (RCA).

My conclusion is that the underlying techniques and processes used in operational environments today to perform RCA remain human centric. As a consequence troubleshooting remains complex, resource intensive and requires skilled practitioners to perform the work.

So, how do we break free from this human bottleneck? Brace yourselves for a glimpse into a future powered by AI. In this article, we’ll dissect the critical issues, showcase how cutting-edge AI advancements can revolutionize RCA, and hear first hand from operations and engineering leaders who have shared their perspective on this transformative tech, having experienced the capabilities first hand.

Troubleshooting In The Cloud Native Era With Monitoring & Observability

Troubleshooting is hard because when degradations or failures occur in components of a business service, they spread like a disease to related service entities which also become degraded or fail.

This problem is amplified in the world of cloud-native applications where we have decomposed business logic into many separate but interrelated service entities. Today an organization might have hundreds or thousands of interrelated service entities (micro services, databases, caches, messaging…).

To complicate things even further, change is a constant – code changes, fluctuating demand patterns, and the inherent unpredictability of user behavior. These changes can result in service degradations or failures.

Testing for all possible permutations in this ever-shifting environment is akin to predicting the weather on Jupiter – an impossible feat – amplifying the importance of a fast, effective and consistent root cause analysis process, to maintain the availability, performance and operational resilience of business systems.

While observability tools have made strides in data visualization and correlation, their inherent inability to explain the cause-and-effect relationships behind problems leaves us dependent on human expertise to navigate the vast seas of data to determine the root cause of service degradation and failures.

This dependence becomes particularly challenging due to siloed devops teams that have responsibility for supporting individual service entities within the complex web of services entities that make up business services. In this context individual teams may frequently struggle to pinpoint the source of service degradation or failure as the entity they support might be the culprit, or a victim of another service entity’s malfunction.

The availability of knowledge and skills within these teams also fluctuate due to business priorities, vacations, holidays, and even the daily working cycles. This resource variability can lead to significant inconsistencies in problem identification and resolution times.

Causal AI To The Rescue: Automating The Root Cause Analysis Process For Cloud Native DevOps

For those who are not aware, Causal AI is a distinct field in Artificial Intelligence. It is already used extensively in many different industries but until recently there has been no application of the technology in the world of devops.

Causely is a new pioneer championing the use of Causal AI working in the area of cloud-native applications. Their platform embodies an understanding of causality so that when service entities are degraded or failing and affecting other service entities that make up business services, it can explain the cause and effect, by showing the relationship between the problem and the symptoms that this causes.

Through this capability, the team with responsibility for the failing or degraded service can be immediately notified and get to work on resolving the problem. Other teams might also be provided with notifications to let them know that their services are affected, along with an explanation for why this occurred. This eliminates the need for complex triage processes that would otherwise involve multiple teams and managers to orchestrate the process.

Understanding the cause-and-effect relationships in software systems serves as an enabler for automated remediation, predictive maintenance, and planning/gaming out operational resilience.

By using software in this way to automate the process of root cause analysis, organizations can reduce the time and effort and increase the consistency in the troubleshooting process, all of which leads to lower operational costs, improved service availability and less business disruption.

Customer Reactions: Unveiling the Transformative Impact of Causal AI for Cloud-Native DevOps

After sharing insights into Causely’s groundbreaking approach to root cause analysis (RCA) with operational and engineering leaders across various organizations, I’ve gathered a collection of anecdotes that highlight the profound impact this technology is poised to have in the world of cloud-native devops.

Streamlined Incident Resolution and Reduced Triage

“By accurately pinpointing the root cause, we can immediately engage the teams directly responsible for the issue, eliminating the need for war rooms and time-consuming triage processes. This ability to swiftly identify the source of problems and involve the appropriate teams will significantly reduce the time to resolution, minimizing downtime and its associated business impacts.”

Automated Remediation: A Path to Efficiency

“Initially, we’d probably implement a ‘fix it’ button that triggers remediation actions manually. However, as we gain confidence in the results, we can gradually automate the remediation process. This phased approach ensures that we can seamlessly integrate Causely into our existing workflows while gradually transitioning towards a more automated and efficient remediation strategy.”

Empowering Lower-Skilled Team Members

“Lower-skilled team members can take on more responsibilities, freeing up our top experts to focus on code development. By automating RCA tasks and providing clear guidance for remediation, Causely will empower less experienced team members to handle a wider range of issues, allowing senior experts to dedicate their time to more strategic initiatives.”

Building Resilience through Reduced Human Dependency

“Causely will enable us to build greater resilience into our service assurance processes by reducing our reliance on human knowledge and intuition. By automating RCA and providing data-driven insights, Causely will help us build a more resilient infrastructure that is less susceptible to human error and fluctuations in expertise.”

Enhanced Support Beyond Office Hours

“We face challenges maintaining consistent support outside of office hours due to reduced on-call expertise. Causely will enable us to handle incidents with the same level of precision and efficiency regardless of the time of day. Causely’s ability to provide automated RCA and remediation even during off-hours ensures that organizations can maintain a high level of service continuity around the clock.”

Automated Runbook Creation and Maintenance

“I was planning to create runbooks to guide other devops team members through troubleshooting processes. Causely can automatically generate and maintain these runbooks for me. This automated runbook generation eliminates the manual effort required to create and maintain comprehensive troubleshooting guides, ensuring that teams have easy access to the necessary information when resolving issues.”

Simplified Post-Incident Analysis

“Post-incident analysis will become much simpler as we’ll have a detailed record of the cause and effect for every incident. Causely’s comprehensive understanding of cause and effect provides a valuable resource for post-incident analysis, enabling us to improve processes, and prevent similar issues from recurring.”

Faster Problem Identification and Reduced Business Impacts

“Problems will be identified much faster, and there will be fewer business consequences.  By automating RCA and providing actionable insights, Causely can significantly reduce the time it takes to identify and resolve problems, minimizing their impact on business operations and customer experience.”

These anecdotes underscore the transformative potential of Causely, offering a compelling vision of how root cause analysis is automated, remediation is streamlined, and operational resilience in cloud-native environments is enhanced. As Causely progresses, the company’s impact on the IT industry is poised to be profound and far-reaching.

Summing Things Up

Troubleshooting in cloud-native environments is complex and resource-intensive, but Causal AI can automate the process, streamline remediation, and enhance operational resilience.

If you would like to learn more about how Causal AI might benefit your organization, don’t hesitate to reach out to me or Causely directly.

Related Resources

• Learn about the causal AI platform from Causely
• Watch the video: Troubleshooting cloud-native applications with Causely
• Request a demo to see Causely in action

Reposted with permission from LinkedIn.

OpenTelemetry and the Path to Understanding Complex Systems

Decades ago, the IETF’s (Internet Engineering Task Force) developed an innovative protocol, SNMP, revolutionizing network management. This standardization spurred a surge of innovation, fostering a new software vendor landscape dedicated to streamlining operational processes in network management, encompassing Fault, Configurations, Accounting, Performance, and Security (FCAPS). Today, SNMP reigns as the world’s most widely adopted network management protocol.

On the cusp of a similar revolution stands the realm of application management. For years, the absence of management standards compelled vendors to develop proprietary telemetry for application instrumentation, to enable manageability. Many of the vendors also built applications to report on and visualize managed environments, in an attempt to streamline the processes of  incident and performance management.

OpenTelemetry‘s emergence is poised to transform the application management market dynamics in a similar way by commoditizing application telemetry instrumentation, collection, and export methods. Consequently, numerous open-source projects and new companies are emerging, building applications that add value around OpenTelemetry.

This evolution is also compelling established vendors to embrace OpenTelemetry. Their futures hinge on their ability to add value around this technology, rather than solely providing innovative methods for application instrumentation.

Adding Value Above OpenTelemetry

While OpenTelemetry simplifies the process of collecting and exporting telemetry data, it doesn’t guarantee the ability to pinpoint the root cause of issues. This is because understanding the causal relationships between events and metrics requires more sophisticated analysis techniques.

Common approaches to analyzing OpenTelemetry data that get devops teams closer to this goal include:

• Visualization and Dashboards: Creating effective visualizations and dashboards is crucial for extracting insights from telemetry data. These visualizations should present data in a clear and concise manner, highlighting trends, anomalies, and relationships between metrics.
• Correlation and Aggregation: To correlate logs, metrics, and traces, you need to establish relationships between these data streams. This can be done using techniques like correlation IDs or trace identifiers, which can be embedded in logs and metrics to link them to their corresponding traces.
• Pattern Recognition and Anomaly Detection: Once you have correlated data, you can apply pattern recognition algorithms to identify anomalies or outliers in metrics, which could indicate potential issues. Anomaly detection tools can also help identify sudden spikes or drops in metrics that might indicate performance bottlenecks or errors.
• Machine Learning and AI: Machine learning and AI techniques can be employed to analyze telemetry data and identify patterns, correlations, and anomalies that might be difficult to detect manually. These techniques can also be used to predict future performance or identify potential issues before they occur.

While all of these techniques might help to increase the efficiency of the troubleshooting process, human expertise is still essential for interpreting and understanding the results. This is because these approaches to analyzing telemetry data are based on correlation and lack an inherent understanding of cause and effect (causation).

Avoiding The Correlation Trap: Separating Coincidence from Cause and Effect

In the realm of analyzing observability data, correlation often takes center stage, highlighting the apparent relationship between two or more variables. However, correlation does not imply causation, a crucial distinction that software-driven causal analysis can effectively address and results in a better outcome in the following ways:

Operational Efficiency And Control: Correlation-based approaches often leave us grappling with the question of “why,” hindering our ability to pinpoint the root cause of issues. This can lead to inefficient troubleshooting efforts, involving multiple teams in a devops environment as they attempt to unravel the interconnectedness of service entities.

Software-based causal analysis empowers us to bypass this guessing game, directly identifying the root cause and enabling targeted corrective actions. This not only streamlines problem resolution but also empowers teams to proactively implement automations to mitigate future occurrences. It also frees up the time of experts in the devops organizations to focus on shipping features and working on business logic.

Consistency In Responding To Adverse Events: The speed and effectiveness of problem resolution often hinge on the expertise and availability of individuals, a variable factor that can delay critical interventions. Software-based causal analysis removes this human dependency, providing a consistent and standardized approach to root cause identification.

This consistency is particularly crucial in distributed devops environments, where multiple teams manage different components of the system. By leveraging software, organizations can ensure that regardless of the individuals involved, problems are tackled with the same level of precision and efficiency.

Predictive Capabilities And Risk Mitigation: Correlations provide limited insights into future behavior, making it challenging to anticipate and prevent potential problems. Software-based causal analysis, on the other hand, unlocks the power of predictive modeling, enabling organizations to proactively identify and address potential issues before they materialize.

This predictive capability becomes increasingly valuable in complex cloud-native environments, where the interplay of numerous microservices and data pipelines can lead to unforeseen disruptions. By understanding cause and effect relationships, organizations can proactively mitigate risks and enhance operational resilience.

Conclusion

OpenTelemetry marks a significant step towards standardized application management, laying a solid foundation for a more comprehensive understanding of complex systems. However, to truly unlock the full potential, the integration of software-driven causal analysis, also referred to as Causal AI, is essential. By transcending correlation, software-driven causal analysis empowers devops  organizations to understand cause and effect of system behavior, enabling proactive problem detection, predictive maintenance, operational risk mitigation and automated remediation.

The founding team of Causely participated in the standards-driven transformation that took place in the network management market more than two decades ago at a company called SMARTS. The core of their solution was built on Causal AI. SMARTS became the market leader of Root Cause Analysis in networks and was acquired by EMC in 2005. The team’s rich experience in Causal AI is now being applied at Causely, to address the challenges of managing cloud native applications.

Causely’s embrace of OpenTelemetry stems from the recognition that this standardized approach will only accelerate the advancement of application management. By streamlining telemetry data collection, OpenTelemetry creates a fertile ground for Causal AI to flourish.

If you are intrigued and would like to learn more about Causal AI the team at Causely would love to hear from you, so don’t hesitate to get in touch.