From revolution to evolution with observability

The technology revolution began more than 70 years ago with the development of digital and communication systems. Since then, we’ve seen exponential growth in all things digital and technological. However, perhaps the most powerful catalyst for growth in this 70-year-long evolution has been the COVID-19 global pandemic. Seemingly overnight, digital transformation initiatives leapt to the top of the priority list as businesses navigated the transition to remote work. Three years later, we’re still working towards this new, highly virtual world and reinventing how we do business while remaining connected to each other — and IT is the primary driver of this evolution.

There’s no digital transformation reward without risk

This rapid transformation has revealed great business opportunities — and risks. Creative business leaders see digital transformation as a way to compete, grow and succeed, but the pressure on IT teams to keep highly distributed environments and critical systems — both in the cloud and on-premises — running at optimal levels has never been greater. IT organisations are challenged to manage the rapid introduction of new technologies while maintaining or transitioning existing systems. The move to the cloud; multiple cloud providers; hybrid combinations of traditional data centres and cloud deployments; distributed microservices-based applications running across private and public networks; numerous physical servers, virtual hosts, and containers; and serverless applications all add complexity to already intricate systems. The business’s demand to leverage these new technologies and the speed at which they’re being implemented make the ramifications of failure significant.

The success or failure of today’s IT implementations is inextricably interwoven with the business; a failed IT implementation can cause the company to falter or drive significant financial or reputational losses. For IT professionals, the stakes have never been higher; there’s little to no room or patience for failure, but well-executed transformations can be the accelerator needed to outpace the competition. With no risk comes no reward.

Evolved IT ecosystems require evolved management processes

Increased dependence on IT requires a significant change in how environments are managed. The traditional siloed approach has gone from inefficient to irresponsible. Management disciplines must merge. Lines are blurring between network, infrastructure and application management. Although IT and DevOps teams are stepping up to manage these new systems, IT resources will continue to be constrained. Hence, IT solutions need to include more intelligence to support the new approach to managing IT.

Successfully managing today’s IT environments requires not only meeting technical and business-level objectives — including business systems availability, performance, cost and security — but providing a management environment capable of scaling quickly with the business. This is where implementing observability becomes critical.

Observability: from reactive to proactive

To support the evolved IT ecosystem, we must go beyond siloed technology monitoring and even beyond how many define observability. Bringing development and operations together to build and deploy higher-quality applications faster has had a positive impact but hasn’t gone far enough. Today’s IT leaders must figure out how to manage an exponentially more complex environment efficiently.

But observability is more than just looking at metrics, traces and logs across technologies. Observability should enable end-to-end oversight of service delivery and reduce operational noise. In doing so, IT Ops, DevOps and security teams can gain more proactive issue and anomaly detection with greater focus, improved prioritisation and more efficient problem resolution. Observability solutions should continuously analyse conditions affecting user experience and performance to predict element problems, service levels and capacity changes. These solutions should advance business agility by enabling the IT organisation to shift its posture from reactive to proactive to achieve optimum IT service performance, compliance and resilience.

Simplify IT management

What should companies look for when managing this new IT landscape? Regardless of what vendor they choose, they should consider selecting a platform designed to support their specific business requirements. They should choose an offering capable of handling their immediate needs and choose a partner with experience and a track record for recognising and delivering on evolving future requirements. It should offer significant breadth and depth of product-agnostic technology to manage and help companies avoid vendor lock-in. The offering should bring together insights into the health and performance of their IT technologies and — more importantly — business services. As IT roles change and the line between monitoring disciplines continues to blur, it’s also important to select an offering built to enable collaboration across organisations and set up teams to manage a service rather than a siloed technology. Lastly, it’s critical for the offering to maximise the utilisation of artificial intelligence and machine-learning-based AIOps to help simplify the management of these complex implementations.

For a business to optimise its digital transformation investment, it must also adopt a strong observability strategy. Today, technology is being embraced faster than ever before, and the success — or failure — of these implementations relies heavily on IT businesses to support it. It’s crucial for teams to recognise the approach to IT management must change to keep pace with the evolution at hand. Shifting focus from the siloed technologies could be the make-or-break factor between weathering the technology storm or being consumed by it.

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