Gaining Complete Visibility: How Observability Powers PXP's Unity Platform

By Salvatore Cicero, Group Chief Technology Officer, PXP

Welcome back to our tech blog series. In our previous posts, we explored how our microservices architecture provides the flexibility and scalability that modern payments demand, and how Kafka enables real-time event processing across our platform. Today, I want to discuss another critical pillar of our technological foundation: observability, and how our comprehensive observability frameworks and tooling helps us maintain complete visibility across our Unity platform.

As we continue to expand our sophisticated microservices ecosystem powered by event-driven architecture, we have gained tremendous advantages in scalability, flexibility, and resilience. However, this distributed approach also introduces new complexities. With dozens of independent services communicating through Kafka events across our Unity platform, understanding system behaviour, identifying issues, and optimising performance becomes increasingly challenging. This is where observability becomes not just beneficial, but essential.

Why Observability is Critical for Modern Payments

In the payments industry, system reliability is not just important, it is everything. When a merchant's customer attempts to make a purchase, that transaction must be processed seamlessly, securely, and instantly. Any delay, error, or outage directly impacts our merchants' revenue and customer satisfaction.

Traditional monitoring approaches, which focus on predefined metrics and basic alerting, are insufficient for today's complex, distributed systems. Observability goes beyond monitoring by providing deep insights into system behaviour, enabling us to understand not just what is happening, but why it is happening. This comprehensive visibility is crucial for:

• Proactive Issue Detection: Identifying potential problems before they impact merchants and their customers
• Rapid Root Cause Analysis: Quickly pinpointing the source of issues across our distributed architecture
• Performance Optimization: Understanding system behaviour patterns to continuously improve efficiency
• Compliance and Auditing: Maintaining detailed records of all system activities for regulatory requirements

How Our Observability Strategy Powers Our Unity Platform

At PXP, we use a robust observability stack that perfectly aligns with our distributed architecture and real-time processing requirements. Our chosen solution’s ability to ingest, index, and analyse large volumes of machine data from our microservices ecosystem makes it an ideal fit for our Unity platform.

Here is what our observability infrastructure enables us to deliver:

• Unified Data Ingestion: Our microservices generate extensive log entries, metrics, and traces throughout our operations. Our observability stack seamlessly ingests this data from across our Unity platform, creating a centralised repository of system intelligence that provides a complete view of our distributed architecture.
• Real-Time Monitoring and Alerting: Our system processes multiple data streams in real-time, enabling immediate detection of anomalies, performance degradation, or system failures. This means we can often resolve issues before our merchants even notice them.
• Advanced Analytics and Machine Learning: Built-in machine learning capabilities help us identify patterns, predict potential issues, and automatically baseline normal system behaviour. This intelligence allows us to move from reactive to predictive operations.
• Comprehensive Visualisation: Complex systems require intuitive dashboards. Our visualisation capabilities transform raw data into actionable insights, enabling our teams to quickly understand system health and performance across all layers of our architecture.

How Our Observability Framework Integrates with Our Unity Platform

Our observability solution provides comprehensive visibility across our Unity platform, collecting and analysing data from every component of our microservices architecture. Our implementation follows a comprehensive approach:

• Microservices Instrumentation: Every microservice in our Unity platform is instrumented to send structured logs, metrics, and distributed traces to our observability infrastructure. This includes application logs, performance metrics, error traces, and business event data flowing through our Kafka streams.
• Infrastructure Monitoring: Our moniotoring tools track the health of our underlying infrastructure, including server performance, network latency, database query performance, and container orchestration metrics. This end-to-end visibility ensures we can correlate application issues with infrastructure events.
• Event Correlation: By integrating with our Kafka event streams, our observability platform can trace individual transactions across multiple microservices, providing complete visibility into payment flows from initiation to settlement. Events from our POS solutions flow through our gateway directly into our monitoring system, providing complete visibility across a merchant's entire estate. This distributed tracing capability is essential for understanding complex, multi-service interactions.
• Custom Dashboards and Reporting: We have developed specialised dashboards that provide real-time insights into key business metrics, system performance, and operational health. These range from high-level executive dashboards to detailed technical views for our engineering teams.

What This Means for Our Merchants

The real value of our observability platform lies in how it supports our merchants:

• Exceptional Uptime and Reliability: Our proactive monitoring and rapid issue resolution capabilities ensure that payment processing remains available when your customers need it most. Our observability approach helps us maintain industry-leading uptime levels.
• Proactive Issue Prevention and Rapid Response: Our comprehensive observability enables us to detect and address potential issues before they impact your operations. With real-time monitoring and intelligent alerting, we can often resolve concerns proactively, ensuring seamless continuity for your business and customers.
• Performance Insights: Our observability platform provides valuable insights into transaction patterns, peak usage times, and system performance trends. This intelligence helps both our teams and yours optimise operations and prepare for demand spikes.
• Transparency and Communication: With complete system visibility, we can provide clear, accurate updates about system status and quickly communicate any issues or maintenance activities that might affect your operations.
• Continuous Improvement: The insights we gain from our observability tools drive continuous improvements to our platform. Every metric, every log entry, and every trace contribute to making our systems more efficient, reliable, and responsive to your needs.

Looking Ahead

Observability is not a destination but a journey of continuous improvement. As our Unity platform evolves and grows, so too does our observability strategy. We are constantly enhancing our monitoring capabilities, developing new insights, and implementing advanced machine learning algorithms for predictive anomaly detection and intelligent pattern recognition to stay ahead of potential issues.

Our investment in comprehensive observability reflects our commitment to operational excellence and merchant success. By maintaining complete visibility into our systems, we can ensure that the innovative capabilities of our microservices architecture and event-driven platform deliver consistent, reliable value to your business.

The payments landscape will continue to evolve, bringing new challenges and opportunities. With our powerful observability strategy in place , we are well-positioned to navigate this complexity while maintaining the performance, reliability, and agility that our merchants depend on.

Interested in how our architecture enables continuous innovation at scale? Check out the earlier blogs in this series by Salvatore Cicero: Embracing Microservices for Growth at PXP and Unlocking the Power of Event Processing at PXP. Together, these posts offer a deeper look into the technology pillars supporting the Unity platform.

About the author:

Salvatore Cicero is the Group Chief Technology Officer at PXP, bringing over two decades of expertise in the payments industry. A visionary leader, Salvatore drives the development and execution of PXP's technology roadmap, ensuring that innovation and strategic alignment meet the evolving needs of the business. His deep industry knowledge and commitment to excellence continue to shape PXP as a leader in the paytech space.

To find out more about the PXP family of companies please visit: http://pxp.io/ or read the PXP blog.