AWS Cloud Visibility vs. Observability... And Where Tenacity Fits In

Jason Yaeger
May 10, 2022
5 min read
Even visibility isn’t enough to get your hands around your AWS cloud environment these days. You need to go beyond visibility to observability.


Public cloud and multi-cloud adoption is accelerating faster than ever before. 

In fact, in a February 2022 ESG study of 357 DevOps, IT, and AppDev professionals, 71% reported leveraging more than 3 cloud infrastructure providers in their organization. And it’s only become more challenging to track and understand cloud data as adoption scales.

Back when managing data was a slower process, it was easy to keep track of things like cloud costs and assets, because you had the mental headspace to keep up with them. You knew where data was at in the process and what existed in your environment. But now, any member of your team can just click a couple of buttons and spin up new assets or make environmental changes, and you can’t possibly keep track of it all.

“Organizations need to operate on average 57% faster than three years ago,” said Scott Sinclair, the Practice Director for ESG who led the research study. “Trying to optimize cloud costs at that speed without the aid of a third-party tool leaves many enterprises ill-equipped to have total visibility into their cloud spend and cost attribution, especially for today’s modern architectures and containerized applications.”

But even visibility isn’t enough to get your hands around your AWS cloud environment these days. You need to go beyond visibility to observability.

Cloud Visibility vs. Observability

The main difference between visibility and observability is visibility only gives you eyes on your data — “Here it is and now you can see it.” — whereas observability allows you to actually gain insight from the data that you’re seeing.

Cloud observability allows you to take away insights from the state of your AWS system, without actually being in the system. Think proper logging, metrics, tagging, asset management, and defined policies. Not only can you see what’s going on inside of your ecosystem, but you can actually interrogate it. You can deep-dive surface level metrics, query them, and build dashboards and monitors around them. With visibility you can look, with observability you can touch.

But the tricky part is that AWS cloud observability is difficult to do on your own. Sure, you can write tooling to sit on top of your processes to interrogate or query your ecosystem to find the information you want… but that new tooling needs maintaining. 

Thankfully, Tenacity lets you reap all the rewards of deep observability without the burden of tool maintenance.

AWS Cloud Observability with Tenacity

64% of IT, DevOps, and AppDev professionals reported that the adoption of public cloud or multiple public cloud providers has made observability significantly more difficult… and that stat only increases to 74% for the technology industry. The fact is, all around, DevOps and IT teams need better observability into their cloud environment. That’s where Tenacity comes in.

Tenacity provides full AWS cloud observability from security and compliance all the way through cost management and savings so that you can get richer and deeper context into what is happening within your cloud environment. 

With Tenacity’s dashboard and platform insights, you can quickly interrogate your data, mine information, build patterns, and monitor your system in real-time. You can even use our system to assign Jira tasks to your team that are related to any assets or data within. Plus, with Tenacity, you can confidently deploy and test new services knowing that observability into your system is wrapped around all of it, down to the last kernel of data.

We're really easy to work with!

Integrate with your cloud providers in under 5 minutes
Flat monthly subscription fee
API first, so we integrate with your existing tools
Setup, configuration, and monthly support from our team of cloud spend management experts included