Guest: Dotan Horovits (LinkedIn)
Company: Logz.io (Twitter)
Show: 2024 Prediction Series

Logz.io is a cloud-native observability platform based on the best open source out there such as Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and OpenSearch. It is managed and scalable. Dotan Horovits, Principal Developer Advocate and Cloud Native Ambassador at Logz.io, shares his predictions for this year.

OpenTelemetry is a significant element in the observability space and in the last year, it has reached general availability of all the three pillars of observability. “Having reached this milestone, we will see increased adoption among the end users and observability vendors pushing out proprietary and open-source telemetry shippers. There will also be an increased focus on continuous profiling with significant efforts toward making it production-grade so that you can deploy, configure, and monitor the observability of OpenTelemetry at scale in production. Other key focuses of OpenTelemetry will be on ease of operation, stability, and performance,” says Horovits.

Tool sprawl and data silos have been key challenges in the observability space and it is predicted that during 2024 instead of collecting these logs, metrics, and traces, the insights and how to draw the insights from the vast amounts of data will be focused on more. Throughout 2024, we will see more organizations utilizing AI and machine learning to draw insights out of the data.

While platform engineering has been the buzzword for 2023, in the coming year we are going to see it being implemented in a production-grade manner. Hyperscalers who have implemented it at scale are starting to share their knowledge with the community. Organizations can take this aggregated knowledge and implement it, particularly the cultural change within the organization to instill collaboration between the central platform engineering team and the distributed DevOps and product engineering teams.

Some of the key challenges this year will be the need for organizational change and the risk of platform engineering becoming another organizational silo. Organizations need to adopt a new culture to put in place centralized platform engineering versus distributed DevOps and product engineering teams.

Another challenge for organizations in 2024 will be increased pressure to optimize IT costs due to the current economic climate. Some of the considerations of this include tool sprawl, and finding one tool to aggregate as much as possible under it. There have been many high-profile stories about the costs of observability highlighting the key challenges of big data on the operational side and complex cloud billing systems. As an industry, there needs to be better phenotypes, observability, and control built into cloud-native systems and systems built across cloud.

Logz.io will be focusing on the unified observability experience due to the demand from a cost and efficiency perspective and the need for consolidation. The company will be focusing on creating a more advanced unified experience and an intuitive user experience. Although they have been offering Jaeger, OpenSearch, and Prometheus as interfaces, users want a higher tier that consolidates the interfaces. Logz.io has started this journey by offering Kubernetes 360 in the app they released. Another key focus in the coming year is AI assistance to help surface issues in users’ systems using generative AI to express queries in natural language and input in natural language. Thirdly, they will be concentrating their efforts on the convergence of observability with APM to bring the capabilities we are used to in a pre-cloud native era to APM.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.