An opinion piece by Gregg Ostrowski, CTO Advisor, Cisco on getting IT teams on board for the journey from monitoring to observability
Across IT departments, we’re seeing a steady march toward full-stack observability. The Application Performance Management (APM) tools that teams once relied on, are now limited when it comes to the monitoring needs of complex hybrid environments. And consequently, new Cisco research shows that observability is now a strategic priority for 85% of organizations around the world. Observability provides IT teams with full and unified visibility across all domains — whether on-premises or in the cloud — enabling them to identify, understand and resolve performance and security issues in a timely way.
With so much benefit to be had, it is tempting for organizations to jump in, both feet first. But maturing from traditional monitoring to observability isn’t an overnight process. With a considered, incremental approach, a two-to-three-year timeline is more realistic. After all, it’s about a lot more than simply implementing a new technology solution; the bigger challenge is driving the cultural and structural change that is essential for organizations to maximize the benefits of observability.
All aboard the observability train
To realize the full potential of their full-stack observability solutions, IT leaders will need to ensure all stakeholders in the IT department are on board. Resistance to change can encumber even the most impressive implementation, so it is key to demonstrate to all technologists (whether they’re developers, operations or security professionals, and whether they’re specialists in cloud native or on-premises environments) how full-stack observability will deliver benefits for them in their everyday work. And how each new capability will alleviate pressure, reduce firefighting and enable IT teams to focus on more fulfilling and high value work.
The observability imperative
Today’s tech-savvy consumers have little patience for brands that fail to deliver on the digital experience they expect. In an effort to keep innovating, organizations have rapidly grown their IT environments, which today can span multiple on-premises locations and cloud. In such a sprawling and volatile hybrid IT estate, traditional APM tools are no longer capable of providing technologists with a complete picture of the application and its underlying infrastructure. When issues arise, IT teams struggle to pinpoint root causes and understand dependencies. As a result, metrics such as Mean-Time-To-Resolution (MTTR) are negatively impacted, and the chances of organizations suffering a revenue and reputation-impacting incident are growing significantly.
Full-stack observability enables IT teams to cut through the complexity of their hybrid environments and provides the visibility and insights technologists need to ensure that applications and supporting infrastructure are operating at peak performance at all times.
While the benefits are apparent, IT leaders cannot discount the fact that no technologist ever likes to be told which tools they should and shouldn’t be using. Many feel that their current APM tools still serve the specific needs of their domain team and enable them to hit their KPIs.
Rather than aiming to rip and replace, IT leaders should ease the transition by choosing an extensible observability platform which embraces open standards. This will allow IT teams to continue to use their preferred tools. An open platform can bring in and correlate signals from any tool, and this makes it a much easier ‘sell’ for CIOs looking to introduce observability across the IT department. They can gradually add new capabilities to their observability platform based on the most pressing business needs and, with each step, prove the value that is being delivered.
How to showcase the benefits of observability to every IT team
To get IT teams on board, and participating in the organizations move towards observability, IT leaders should focus on emphasizing the milestones on the journey towards observability that will most help these stakeholders in performing their daily tasks more effectively. Here are three examples which can help drive buy-in and support:
1. Expanding visibility across domains
By integrating infrastructure visibility, including Kubernetes and hosted environments, along with network visibility, IT teams can extend their monitoring beyond the application layer. This enables swift identification of specific domain issues, bridging visibility gaps across hybrid environments where application components operate, leading to reduced MTTR.
For technologists working in DevOps, NetOps or InfraOps, domain visibility brings huge benefits. It puts an end to the constant firefighting — trying to understand the root cause of issues — and allows them to adopt a more proactive and strategic approach to their work. Any IT practitioner who has faced the challenge of troubleshooting under pressure would welcome this.
2. Building security into observability
Many IT professionals have had sleepless nights because of security incidents. So, highlighting how observability can enhance security is a sure way to garner support. By adding security monitoring into their observability capabilities, organizations can ensure complete protection for applications, from development through to production, across code, containers, and Kubernetes. This is becoming mission-critical for organizations in many sectors that are having to manage ever more sophisticated threats.
Importantly, the integration of security breaks down long-established silos, fostering increased collaboration between security and application teams. This paves the way for the adoption of DevSecOps methodologies. This new approach allows developers to embed robust security into every line of code, resulting in more secure applications and easier security management, before, during and after release.
3. Generating a customer perspective on digital experience
By implementing digital experience monitoring (DEM), organizations can analyze application performance through a customer lens, understanding and optimizing the experience that end users are encountering when interacting with applications and digital services. Functionality such as Session Replay enables operations teams to visualize how customers are behaving and interacting with their applications, and this insight is hugely valuable given the extent to which consumers are now demanding world-class digital experiences at all times.
Other milestones on the journey to observability include integrating cost insights, enabling CloudOps teams to analyze and optimize the costs of their cloud workloads, and automated rightsizing of cloud workloads to drive efficiency and digital experience.
With IT leaders now earning their rightful place at the decision-making table, it is also essential for IT leaders to add business context into their observability strategy in order to correlate IT data with real-time business metrics. This ensures that every IT team can identify the most important issues, based on potential impact to customers and the business, and prioritize their resources in these areas.
The move to observability is now inevitable, so the sooner IT leaders can get their teams on board, the faster they will realize benefits, both within the IT department and beyond. As well as ensuring that organizations can deliver seamless and secure digital experiences, observability also provides a platform for technologists to transform their careers. They can embrace new ways of working, learn new skills and forge new partnerships across the IT department, setting them up to thrive in a hybrid future.
