Unleashing the power of observability
As anybody who works in IT knows only too well, accelerated digital transformation over recent years has led to soaring complexity within IT departments. In particular, increased deployment of cloud native technologies has left technologists struggling to manage a highly dynamic and fragmented IT environment.
Currently very few technologists have a full and unified view on IT availability and performance across multi-cloud and hybrid environments and this is making it incredibly difficult to identify and resolve performance issues and to spot and remediate security vulnerabilities before they impact end users. The result of this is constant firefighting within the IT department, with technologists caught on the back foot, operating under immense pressure to avoid costly downtime or a catastrophic outage.
This is why IT leaders need to adopt a new approach to manage and optimize IT availability and performance across their IT estate, progressing from traditional monitoring to observability.
Observability enables technologists to maximize their impact, prioritizing their efforts based on business outcomes and validating digital transformation investment. Across all sectors, observability is starting to deliver game-changing benefits to forward-thinking organizations, delivering seamless digital experiences to customers, enabling hybrid work, and providing the foundation for rapid and sustainable transformation.
Moving from monitoring to observability
As organizations increasingly move to hybrid environments, with application components running across cloud and on-premises environments, IT teams need to ensure they have unified visibility across their entire IT estate.
Currently however, most IT departments are deploying separate tools to monitor on-premises and cloud applications, and this means they have no clear line of sight of the entire application path across hybrid environments. This means they are having to run a split screen mode and can’t see the complete path up and down the application stack. As a result, it becomes incredibly difficult to troubleshoot issues which means that MTTR and MTTX inevitably go up, as does the likelihood of end users encountering a poor digital experience.
Most monitoring solutions simply can’t handle dynamic and highly volatile cloud-native environments. These highly distributed systems rely on thousands of containers and spawn a massive volume of metrics, events, logs and traces (MELT) every second. And currently, most technologists simply don’t have a way to cut through this crippling data noise when troubleshooting application performance problems caused by infrastructure-related issues that span across hybrid cloud environments. Nor do they have unified visibility across what is increasingly a sprawling and fragmented IT estate.
Critically, traditional monitoring only tells IT teams whether applications or supporting infrastructure are running – monitoring solutions are just focused on avoiding downtime and outages. But that’s no longer enough. Technologists need to know how applications and supporting infrastructure are performing, in real-time, 24/7.
This is why organizations need an observability solution which provides flexibility to span across both cloud native and on-premises environments – with telemetry data from cloud native environments and agent-based entities within legacy applications being ingested into the same platform. Technologists need to be able to properly understand how their application is performing, and therefore they need visibility across the application level, into the supporting digital services (such as microservices or Kubernetes) and into the underlying infrastructure-as-code (IaC) services (such as compute, server, database, and network) they leverage from their cloud providers.
This unified visibility and insight is crucial for technologists to cut through complexity and optimize availability and performance at all times; and it’s vital for IT leaders to lead their organizations into a new phase of digital transformation.
The game-changing benefits of observability
Observability enables technologists to monitor the health of key business transactions distributed across their entire technology landscape. If an issue is detected, they can follow the thread of the business transaction’s telemetry data, so they can quickly determine the root cause of issues, with fault domain isolation, and triage the issue to the correct teams for expedited resolution. Rather than spending hours trying to understand the potential severity of a problem, IT teams can immediately prioritize issues and focus their efforts on the right places.
Observability makes it far easier for IT teams to manage and optimize applications and always supporting infrastructure, irrespective of whether they reside in the cloud or on premises. And therefore, they can deliver brilliant, seamless digital experiences that engage and excite customers and keep them coming back for more. Observability becomes the foundation for brands to differentiate in the market and drive competitive advantage through digital experience.
Another benefit of observability is that it breaks down silos between people, processes and data and harnesses a culture of collaboration in the IT department which is so important when organizations are dealing with the complexity and dynamism of multi-cloud and hybrid environments. A unified view of the entire IT environment provides a single source of truth for all availability and performance data, and this means that all teams, and the business as a whole, can work in collaboration, making smarter, faster decisions.
Perhaps most importantly, given that digital transformation investment is coming under scrutiny as organizations look for cost efficiencies, observability provides IT leaders with the ability to generate business transaction insights in real-time, and then to view them in business-level dashboards. Rather than being in the dark when it comes to ROI, IT leaders can continually track and share the value that innovation programs are delivering.
Observability enables IT leaders to take an agile approach to digital transformation, focusing their investments where they are having or could have the biggest benefit for customers, employees, and ultimately, the business. They can validate their investments in real-time and achieve their digital transformation objectives.
Over the next few years, as organizations enter the next era of innovation, market share will increasingly be determined by the ability of brands to provide customers with world-class digital experiences. By transitioning to observability now, organizations can get a head start.