I sat and passed the Elastic Certified Observability Engineer exam this week. The exam experience has changed since I sat the Elastic Certified Engineer exam two years ago but it’s still a great setup and everything ran without a problem.

The certification curriculum is a great way to get started with observability using The Elastic Stack. I answered questions about configuring and running Metricbeat, Filebeat, and Heartbeat, setting up Application Performance Monitoring, building a Kibana dashboard, creating an ingest pipeline, configuring some machine learning jobs, and other topics. I felt that the amount of knowledge you need for this exam is less than that for Elastic Certified Engineer but there’s still some depth to the material.

Observability is becoming easier to implement, and organisations are investing time and money into improving their solutions. The Elastic Stack is only one of the growing number of players in the observability field. Datadog and Prometheus are two other players who are growing their customer list.

A lot of technical topics can turn out to be rabbit holes of discovery, and observability is no different. Surfacing logs and metrics from all your systems is barely half the battle; there’s still deployment, storage, visualisation, and alerting to deal with, as well as correctly interpreting the data.

I’ve been reading Systems Performance 2nd Edition by Brendan Gregg and it’s been a humbling experience. There are so many moving parts in any deployment, and each component has its own features and quirks to learn.

I believe observability will become increasingly important to both large and small enterprises in the coming years. At BestPath, we’re working to improve the observability of Cisco ACI and other complementary products. We believe the tools we’re going to be providing offer customers visibility they don’t even know is possible.