Application Observability
Welcome to Virtana Application Observability!
As an IT leader or engineer, your priority is keeping services running smoothly. Application slowdowns can be difficult to fix because the root cause often hides deep in the infrastructure. Virtana Application Observability (AO) solves this by providing a single view of your applications across your entire hybrid estate.
What is Application Observability?
Virtana Application Observability (AO) allows you to monitor your applications regardless of where they run—whether on physical servers, virtual machines (VMs), on-premises, or in the cloud. It connects application performance data, like traces and logs, directly to the health of the underlying infrastructure.
While Virtana Container Observability (CO) remains our specialized tool for Kubernetes infrastructure, Application Observability (AO) is a broader capability that works across both containers and VMs. If you already use Virtana CO, your license already includes these Virtana Application Observability features for your containerized environments.
Core Capabilities
Virtana Application Observability is built on the existing Virtana Platform, but introduces several key capabilities to help you resolve issues faster.
Global Trace Topology: Tracing is no longer limited to containers. You can now run traces against VMs monitored by Virtana Infrastructure Observability (IO) or Virtana Service Observability (SO).
Trace Root Cause Analysis (TraceRCA) Alerts: This new alert type automatically links application-specific issues to the infrastructure that is causing the problem, helping you troubleshoot much faster.
Site Availability Monitoring (Synthetics): Through our integration with Virtana Service Observability (formerly Zenoss), you can now monitor site availability and web transactions to ensure your users can always access your services.
In addition to these key features, Virtana AO uses logs for troubleshooting issues, and other Virtana Platform and AI capabilities, including Event intelligence and response policies as well as custom dashboards.
Getting Started and Setup
You can find most Virtana Application Observability features in Global View. To start collecting data, you must install specific components based on your environment.
Cloud setup
To enable full observability for cloud applications, install the following:
Tracing: Install CO South with an OpenTelemetry (OTEL) collector, Trace Router, and Trace Gateway.
Logs: Install CO South with a Log Gateway, Alloy collector, and OTEL collector.
Synthetics: Use a Service Observability (SO) cloud instance with the Site Availability Monitoring (SAM) or Web Transaction ZenPacks. See Site Availability Monitoring in Virtana SO.
On-premises setup
For on-premises environments, you must meet all the cloud requirements above and also ensure Global View (GV) and CO North are installed.
Learn more
View these resources to dive deeper into our core troubleshooting features: