Speed defines success in today’s digital economy. With customers expecting flawless digital experiences and competition hovering just a click away, companies turn to cloud-native technologies like microservices, containers and Kubernetes to accelerate innovation, build applications faster and improve performance. However, moving to cloud-native technologies and distributed architectures introduces new challenges around speed, scale and complexity of data — challenges that traditional monitoring solutions simply weren’t designed to handle.

Here, we provide 12 immutable rules for observability for ongoing success no matter the complexity of your environment. The more observable a system is, the quicker we can understand why it’s acting up and fix it — which is critical when meeting service-level indicators (SLIs) and objectives (SLOs) and, ultimately, accelerating business results.