What is Observability?
Let’s begin with a simple question: what is Observability, really? At its core, Observability is about understanding what’s happening inside your systems. Not just knowing that something is wrong, but being able to dig into why it’s happening. That means capturing signals from all parts of your stack: infra, applications, processes, and even integrations between systems.
In Cloud Native environments, where applications are distributed and dynamic, Observability is essential for maintaining performance, availability, and reliability. Unlike traditional monitoring, which focuses on predefined issues, Observability helps teams explore unknowns: identifying patterns, diagnosing complex problems, and predicting future issues. It provides deep visibility into every layer of the stack, from infrastructure and containers to application code and user behavior.
With a strong Observability setup, teams can respond faster to incidents, optimize performance, and improve the overall user experience. More importantly, it enables proactive operations by offering context-rich insights that go beyond isolated alerts. As organizations adopt microservices, Kubernetes, and hybrid cloud architectures, Observability becomes a critical foundation for managing complexity and building confidence in production systems.
Observability and Elastic Cloud
There are multiple providers of Observability solutions, such as Elastic. Elastic Cloud offers a powerful, scalable Observability solution built on the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash). With Elastic Observability, teams can unify all their telemetry data in one place, whether it comes from cloud infrastructure, applications, or end-user devices. It enables full visibility across your stack, with features like real-time log analysis, metrics visualization, distributed tracing, and machine learning–powered anomaly detection.
Deployed as a fully managed service, Elastic Cloud simplifies setup, scaling, and maintenance, so teams can focus on insights rather than infrastructure. Native integrations with tools like Kubernetes, Azure, AWS, and popular APM libraries make onboarding fast and efficient. Elastic’s flexible pricing and powerful search capabilities further support organizations in building a cost-effective Observability practice that grows with them. Whether you’re troubleshooting performance issues, ensuring availability, or optimizing systems, Elastic Cloud provides the depth and scale needed to truly understand what’s happening under the hood.
How to Start With Observability Using Elastic Cloud
Starting with Observability using Elastic Cloud begins with keeping things simple and pragmatic. Don’t try to monitor everything at once. Begin with uptime monitoring. Just check whether your systems and services are reachable. Tools like Elastic Synthetics make this easy to implement and immediately valuable. Once that’s in place, expand into collecting basic infrastructure metrics, such as CPU usage, memory, disk space, and network performance.
If you’re running in Azure, Elastic provides native integrations through VM extensions, which allow you to install agents and begin collecting data without complex manual configurations. From there, you can gradually add log collection and more detailed application-level monitoring. But be mindful: every signal you ingest has a cost. So apply the 80/20 rule: focus on the 20% of systems and metrics that provide 80% of the insight.
But implementing Observability with Elastic Cloud isn’t just a technical task, it also requires clear internal processes, strong ownership, and collaboration across teams. One of the biggest challenges isn’t collecting data, but deciding what to monitor, why it matters, and who is accountable. Teams need to align on shared priorities: are we focusing on infrastructure uptime, application performance, or key business processes? Once those goals are clear, it’s critical to establish ownership: who writes and approves monitoring configurations, who maintains the dashboards, and who takes action when alerts fire. Without this structure, Observability efforts often become fragmented and ineffective.
As your Observability practice matures, these questions become even more important. Elastic Cloud provides the flexibility and tooling to support a wide range of use cases, but it’s the internal clarity and governance that determine whether it actually derives value. Start small, test often, and build incrementally. Observability isn’t something you “install”, it’s something you grow into. With the right foundation in place, you create not just visibility into your systems, but the ability to act on that insight with confidence.
A Real-World Example of Implementing Observability Using Elastic Cloud
In a recent project, I helped a client get started with Observability using Elastic Cloud. They didn’t have anything in place yet, so we began at the beginning: setting up a clear and simple process. Each team was asked what they wanted to keep an eye on, whether it was infrastructure performance, uptime, or specific log data. I worked with the infrastructure team to review those ideas and roll them out using infrastructure-as-code, which helped keep everything consistent and manageable. This way, teams had the freedom to focus on what mattered to them, without creating chaos.
The results came quickly. Dashboards weren’t just pretty graphs, they actually helped teams spot and solve problems. One team found virtual machines that no one was using, quietly racking up cloud costs. Shutting those down saved money instantly.
Not everything went smoothly. One integration didn’t support IPv6 properly, so I built a custom pipeline to clean up the data. It took extra work, but made the dashboards reliable and meaningful. That’s the thing with Observability: you only get value if you’re willing to put in the effort. We built it up step by step, from basic uptime checks to deeper metrics and logs. With the right tools, a solid process, and clear responsibilities, the client now has a setup that works and grows with them.
Conclusion
Elastic Cloud is a powerful platform for Observability, especially in a complex environment like Azure. But no matter which tools you use, the principles remain the same. Start where it’s easy. Deliver quick wins. And expand from there.
Thinking about kicking off Observability in your own environment? Whether you’re using Azure, AWS, or something hybrid, we’re happy to help you figure out where to begin and how to get value fast.
