Observability as Code: Why You Should You Use OaC

In the fast-moving world of CI/CD pipelines, microservice architectures, and container orchestration, software changes rapidly. What exists in a codebase today might be gone next week.

At this scale and speed, it's impossible for development teams to manually track every line of code and every new piece of functionality. That's why Infrastructure as Code (IaC) became a foundational DevOps practice: replacing manual provisioning with version-controlled, machine-readable configuration files to manage infrastructure.

The benefits of infrastructure as code:

• Rapid delivery of value

• Enhanced security (lower risk)

• Simplified and scalable provisioning

• Optimized changes

• Consistency across the organization

• Better tracking of resource usage

So here's the question: Why don't we apply the same principles to observability?

What is Observability as Code (OaC)?

Just like IaC applies software development practices to infrastructure management, observability as code (OaC) does the same for observability.

Instead of creating dashboards, alerts, and integrations manually through observability platform UIs, OaC defines them in human-readable configuration files. These files can be:

• Version-controlled

• Reviewed through pull requests

• Deployed alongside your code

With the need to interact directly with UIs or CLIs now eliminated, it's easy to maintain, update, and deploy changes across environments.

Why use Observability as Code?

Observability as code helps teams overcome the inefficiencies and inconsistencies that sometimes result from traditional observability. It offers benefits similar to infrastructure as code:

• Shareable, standardized, and consistent

• Scalable, automated, and repeatable

• Secure

Let's break these down.

Shareability, standardization, and consistency

Code-managed observability resources can be packaged into reusable modules, allowing different services and different environments to share configurations. This means:

• Observing the end result in your observability platform is more consistent, across the entire organization.

• Changes made once are easily applied.

For resources like dashboards, charts, or alerts, consistency means you can easily interpret data across services, products, and teams. During incidents, the ability to find key metrics and compare them across environments means:

1. Faster insight into root cause

2. Decreased time to incident resolution

Additionally, with observability configurations version-controlled, you get:

Scalable, automated, and repeatable

With observability as code, configurations live alongside the codebases they monitor. No more scrambling through hundreds of alerts in a UI to adjust thresholds. Instead, engineers can:

• Edit config files directly and redeploy observability resources.

• Apply changes across multiple resources and multiple environments in minutes.

All of this is especially valuable in microservice architectures, where each service exists in multiple environments (development, staging, production). OaC speeds up development and issue detection and resolution. That's because now teams have the same insight and visibility into every environment, and potentially across every team.

Improved security

OaC also tightens observability-related security in several ways:

• API keys and credentials are stored securely with other code secrets.

• Admin access isn't required for observability configuration.

• Administrators can better track usage (and cost) of observability tools.

How to get started with Observability as Code

The most common tools for OaC are Terraform and OpenTofu.

These tools allow you to define observability resources in config files alongside your infrastructure. These files describe what you want your monitoring setup to look like - the dashboards, alerts, charts, integrations you need - and the tool creates and maintains them.