The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.
Arthur Conan Doyle in The Hound of the Baskervilles
Name
Observe
Statement
All aspects of the activity and quality of services are monitored by centralised monitoring platform services.
Rationale
- Increase the availability of services at runtime (see Design for Resilience).
- Keeping pace with business needs throughout the service lifecycle (see Design for Evolutivity).
Implications
- Ensure service performance monitoring (APM).
- Ensure the automatic triggering of recovery procedures when problems occur or scale-out during large and unforeseen loads.
- Enable continuous feedback on a service: usage analysis and user satisfaction.
Examples
Bad
The Customer Management service requires mandatory entry of customer data in one of its forms. This data is no longer required for the work process. However, users are forced to enter junk data in order to submit the form. Users are aware of this problem but cannot easily express their annoyance at the time and later give up.
Good
Users of the Appointment Management service have the opportunity to give feedback and to propose and vote on improvements directly from the application service. The group responsible for the service is informed of users’ expectations and designs the service’s evolutions according to users’ needs. Users see the service adapt over time and better support their needs.
