ABSTRACT
Visibility risks create uncertainty as to the true state of user demand, service components, or underlying resources. Incomplete, incorrect, or stale knowledge of the true state of a service can prompt incorrect actions or inactions, both of which can impact user service quality. Without full, accurate, and timely visibility into the true operational status of all service components and facilities of an application service, it is difficult to detect, localize, and resolve of inevitable service quality impairments or adjust application's configuration to improve operational efficiency. This chapter factors these visibility risks as follows: obstructed vision risk, blurred vision risk, stale vision risk, and mirage risk. Accuracy and timeliness of fault, alarm, and other critical state data is routinely validated against ground-truth reality, such as comparing the timeliness and accuracy of cloud service provider's alarming of an actual virtual machine error/failure event and when the application user service was impacted. Close monitoring and continuous improvement can reduce visibility risks over time.
