Toward the Observability of Cloud-Native Applications: The Overview of the State-of-the-Art

Joanna Kosinska, Bartosz Balis, Marek Konieczny, Maciej Malawski, Slawomir Zielinski

The Cloud-native model, established to enhance the Twelve-Factor patterns, is an approach to developing and deploying applications according to DevOps concepts, Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery, containers, and microservices. The notion of observability can help us cope with the complexity of such applications. We present a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) in the observability of Cloud-native applications. We have chosen 56 studies published between 2018 and 2022. The selected studies were thoroughly analyzed, compared, and classified according to the chosen comparative criteria. The presented SMS assesses engineering approaches, maturity, and efficiency of observability by deliberating around four research questions: 1) What provides the motivations for equipping Cloud-native applications with observability capabilities? 2) Which research areas are addressed in the related literature? 3) How are observability approaches implemented? 4) What are the future trends in the Cloud-native applications observability research?