Why observability should be your top priority this year

Still a relatively new discipline, observability has continued to gain ground in recent years. The pandemic-era rush of cloud adoption significantly exacerbated monitoring challenges, making observability a consistent aspect of modern IT. This means that, as more organisations are experiencing the challenges associated with hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructure, observability became the solution to their visibility issues.

One of the big topics in recent years has been a modern approach to monitoring that provides complete visibility and context across the full stack of infrastructure, applications and the customer experience. That’s where observability comes in, helping businesses ensure digital health, reliability and performance — making it an absolutely essential tool in today’s hypercomplex environments.

All organisations have a digital presence, with an increasing number of moving parts — especially for the larger ones where the complexity is often unpredictable. The success of the digital ecosystem, and ultimately the organisation, depends on observability to keep everything running.

Research from Splunk’s 2022 State of Observability report found that the most sophisticated observability practitioners are able to cut downtime costs by 90%, from an estimated $23.8 million annually to just $2.5 million, compared to observability beginners. What’s more, leaders in observability are more innovative and more successful at achieving digital transformation outcomes and other initiatives.

As observability moves from a business differentiator to a core competency, these are the two main trends Australian business leaders and decision-makers must be mindful of in 2023.

Observability will be the new face of digital transformation — and digital experience

At the start of the digital age, “digital transformation” was a useful term for a broad set of modernisation efforts expected to deliver various significant payoffs, such as reducing costs and streamlining service delivery. Digital transformation today is faster, more focused and all about providing a seamless experience for customers — something that became a priority to many organisations during the pandemic as they saw an uplift in digital customer interaction and remote collaboration.

In 2023, digital transformation is here to stay — but it comes with challenges. The complexity of greater, faster digital transformation can be tricky for most organisations, and having the right tools to manage that becomes even more critical. More and more, a strong observability practice is the best way to get the insights that will allow organisations to respond to changes in system behaviour before the end user is affected. In other words, observability plays the role of an essential driver of digital experience enabling IT teams to remedy any problems at a pace, even before customers are aware of them.

In 2023 — in a completely digital world, not having early-warning systems in place isn’t an option for businesses anymore.

Observability and security data and tools will converge to create more resilient organisations

Business resilience is a hot new buzzword for 2023, but there’s so much more to it for organisations, including data and tools moving from two formerly siloed aspects of resilience to contributing as one to the durability and strength of digital systems.

In organisations, there’s a natural overlap between what is traditionally Operations and Security, with the more progressive ones investing in finding ways to optimise their data and tooling to accelerate incident resolution. Increasingly, uniting data and processes becomes an imperative to risk mitigation — and the opposite can mean a disaster waiting to happen.

This is going to be a key trend for 2023: the consolidation of both data and tools. Splunk’s latest Observability and IT Predictions Report highlighted how a convergence of trends and technologies will reshape resilience in the year ahead. Essential data, both on-premises and cloud, can no longer be siloed. The complex interconnectedness of applications makes both availability and security a more difficult problem. As the data comes together, and teams collaborate more across the DevSecOps spectrum, there’s a tooling shift too. Point solutions that see and serve only a small part of the situation aren’t helping resilience, and maintaining expertise across so many tools can be a burden on fast-changing organisations.

Splunk’s 2022 State of Observability and State of Security reports both found that while the most mature organisations in both disciplines reported using as many or more tools than newer organisations, they had dramatically reduced the number of vendors providing those tools. This is because there is more to be gained from a convergence, significantly impacting the business resilience when teams can use a common tool with a common set of data.

When facing the challenges of an ever-changing landscape, organisations need to be prioritising observability in 2023 to create more resilient organisations and enhance the digital experience for their customers. As a business leader or decision-maker, you can bet you will hear more about it in the coming months. Now more than ever, organisations need to be strategic when it comes to use observability solutions to address visibility problems.

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