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Black box and white box monitoring, and why IT observability needs both



Monitoring is essential for enhancing the reliability, performance, and user experience of all software systems. IT operations can employ two key monitoring strategies to assess system health: black box and white box monitoring. This blog discusses both approaches and highlights how ManageEngine Site24x7, an AI-based IT observability platform, can assist organizations in adopting white box monitoring to improve IT operations.
 
In aviation, a black box captures crucial data from incidents, allowing investigators to analyze what went wrong afterwards. In IT, black box monitoring functions similarly; it involves responding to alerts that indicate existing problems necessitating reactive measures. The black box monitoring approach reveals what has failed after the point of failure. It provides a way for IT teams to conduct root cause analysis to understand the failure's origin and eliminate it.
 
Conversely, white box monitoring offers a proactive perspective. Examining system health from within enables better insights into potential issues before they escalate into incidents. This forward-looking approach allows IT operations teams or automated systems to intervene preemptively, minimizing downtime and preventing outages. By adopting white box monitoring, organizations can transition from a reactive monitoring strategy to a proactive one, enhancing their overall operational efficiency and saving themselves from reputation damage.

Black box monitoring: The external lens

A black box monitoring tool makes sense of metrics and simulates the end-user experience. While it focuses on externally observable signals, it does not give IT operations teams knowledge of the system's internal workings from within. Black box monitoring answers the question, "Is the system working as expected from the user's perspective?"
 
Key characteristics: An external focus, the end-user perspective, functional testing, and high-level metrics

Examples of black box monitoring
HTTP endpoint availability monitoring: Verifying website and API endpoint accessibility
Website availability, performance, and security monitoring: Tracking the most vital website metrics
API response time monitoring: Measuring API performance
End-to-end transaction tests: Validating critical user workflows
Synthetic monitoring: Unearthing slow-performing parts and vulnerabilities
User experience monitoring: Tracking website load times, error rates, and user satisfaction

White box monitoring: The internal eye

White box monitoring delves into an IT system's internal components and processes, providing granular insights into its behavior and performance. It answers the question, "How is the system working internally?"
 
Key characteristics: An internal focus, detailed metrics, proactive troubleshooting, the potential for using AI-led anomaly detection, and automated remediation

Examples of white box monitoring
Resource usage monitoring: Tracking CPU usage, memory usage, disk I/O, and other resource metrics
Database monitoring: Monitoring query execution times and database health
Application performance monitoring (APM): Tracking custom metrics relevant to the application's internal state
Network performance monitoring: Tracking at the device, protocol, and configuration levels
Log analysis: Examining application and system logs to identify errors and anomalies

Global monitoring trends

In a complex, distributed, hybrid cloud scenario, observability can be achieved via a combination of perspectives: external (black box) and internal (white box) monitoring. There are five defining trends emerging in global IT monitoring that further increase the need for a combined black box and white box monitoring strategy:

Towards observability: IT operations teams now focus on comprehensive observability that cuts across all layers of the tech stack to understand and gain deep, actionable insights into the internal state of and dependencies within the systems. 
AIOps and its role: AIOps has emerged from the hype cycle and been widely adopted, especially in IT operations. It helps teams automate tasks, detect anomalies better, and bring in a sea of changes in incident management. 
OpenTelemetry: This is a global standard for collecting and exporting metrics that is paving the way for the standardization of observability.
CXOs and business-centric monitoring: Many corporate leaders have begun to tie monitoring data to their business outcomes and want to stay on top of it through observability, demanding a complete picture of the health of their systems.
Increasing complexity: Due to the rise of cloud-native technologies, microservices, and distributed systems, IT is moving towards hybrid clouds, managed services, containerization, and monitoring-as-code. This is driving the adoption of holistic observability solutions.  

A balanced approach with Site24x7

While each approach has its strengths, a comprehensive monitoring strategy leverages both black box and white box monitoring. While black box monitoring helps ensure a positive user experience, white box monitoring helps identify the root cause of underlying issues proactively.
 
Site24x7 supports both with a balanced approach that provides a unified platform for both black box and white box monitoring. Its key features include:
 
Website monitoring: Comprehensive black box monitoring of website availability, performance, and the user experience
APM: In-depth white box monitoring of application performance, including code-level insights and transaction tracing
Infrastructure monitoring: Detailed monitoring of servers, networks, and other infrastructure components
AI-powered analytics: Leveraging AI to detect anomalies, predict potential issues, and automate incident management

Industry cases

E-commerce: Online retail heavily depends on a high-performance, scalable cloud infrastructure to ensure smooth operations. E-commerce companies can benefit from a combined white box and black box IT monitoring strategy to identify and resolve issues proactively and ensure customers are happy. White box monitoring helps companies spot early warning signs in security and scale their IT infrastructure to provide an adequate, cost-effective base for their website. Black box monitoring helps companies identify external threads, like DDoS attacks or hacking attempts, and track the user experience—things that are exclusively external perspectives.
Financial services: Customers choose banks that provide a hassle-free, unified, app-based user experience with maximum uptime and security features. At the back end, there are typically several strongly guarded on-premises systems that work in tandem with an increasing list of externally linked services to provide a richer, more personalized banking experience. IT teams in banks can benefit from a black box monitoring tool for its detection of threats and user-side issues, like slow loading times or transaction failures (an important crash metric). A white box monitoring tool can bolster the security postures of internal systems, use APM to proactively identify specific components that slow down a transaction chain, and generate detailed audit trails that can be used for regulatory compliance and audit requirements.   

Combine black box and white box monitoring for a holistic view

IT leaders can begin with surface-level black box monitoring that is easy to set up to gain general health checks and uptime alerts, then add white box monitoring capabilities for in-depth monitoring that helps in granular performance optimization and debugging activities. By combining black box and white box monitoring on a unified platform like Site24x7, organizations can gain a holistic view of their systems, improving reliability, optimizing performance, and delivering exceptional user experiences.