Meet the Observability Team with Gaurav Saxena

Mar 8, 2023

Autonomic is revolutionizing how developers interact with vehicles on a global scale, and we rely on our Observability Team to provide us with visibility into the many services that make up the Transportation Mobility Cloud (TMC). I met with Gaurav Saxena, Senior Engineering Manager of our Observability Team, to find out how his group helps us ensure our platform is operating as efficiently as possible.

You may be wondering what observability is.

In simple terms, observability can be defined as having insight into our platform. Observability gives us an understanding of what our system is doing and how well it is doing. It helps us determine if our services are functioning as intended. Observability also assists our teams in preventing and minimizing negative impacts on platform performance before they affect our users. Our Observability Team utilizes various tools to monitor the TMC and generate this insight.

“With the TMC, we have an all-encompassing approach to observability. We utilize a wide range of open-source, commercial off-the-shelf, and in-house solutions to generate our data and derive insight from it,” Gaurav said.

So, why is observability important at Autonomic?

Similar to how you may schedule routine checkups with your doctor to make sure your physical health is in good shape, we consistently monitor our platform to gauge the health of our system. 

“With millions of vehicles connected to the TMC, our teams rely on our observability tooling to help identify and diagnose issues in the field, such as cellular connectivity faults or misconfigured devices,” Gaurav said.

Having visibility over our platform operations is critical, especially when we need to monitor for potential irregularities that could affect services. Observability allows us to quickly identify these irregularities so we can take precautionary measures and minimize downtime for our customers. 

In addition, observability helps our internal developers ensure their applications are functioning as intended and can serve as a useful resource if troubleshooting is needed.

“The most exciting thing about being a part of the Observability Team is getting to work on challenging projects and coming up with creative solutions to help improve our customer experience,” Gaurav said.