How can IT's most pressing challenges be solved with pragmatic observability?

In mid-2022, Tesla announced a smart way to offer car insurance: premiums would be based on actual, real-time driving behaviour. Offered across a few of Tesla’s top selling models, these vehicles observe the driving habits of the customer and use the telemetry data to generate a safety score, based on which discounts are offered.

Similarly, organisations today have increasingly shifted to a practice of observing their environment to forecast and analyse rogue patterns or anomalies, investigate root causes, and implement solutions. This practice is aided by observability, the latest IT buzzword. But what is observability, and how might it play a role in your IT environment?

What is observability and what does it deliver?

Observability is the ability to acquire and analyse statistical information from multiple data sources within an environment or infrastructure. The three pillars of observability are: metrics, logs, and traces. The telemetry data gathered is then used to assess the performance of all the components in your environment to answer the question “what changed?”

In a report on top strategic technology trends of 2023, Gartner^® said that by basing decisions on actual stakeholder actions, rather than theoretical predictions or intentions, applied observability provides a unique opportunity to drive competitive advantage through shorter latency of decision making and time to market, accuracy, and proactive customer centricity.

What does observability deliver to modern IT?

Modern networks are increasingly distributed, with applications and services spread across multiple environments, cloud providers, and geographical locations. With the rise of cloud computing, microservices, and containers, IT systems have become more distributed and complex than ever before. These systems generate a vast amount of data that must be monitored and analysed to ensure they are running effectively and efficiently. But managing or monitoring these modern IT environments with traditional methods such as availability monitoring or port scanning alone may end up being insufficient, since dealing with dynamic environments is an entirely different ball game.

Observability, combined with the advantages of AI/ML-based technologies, can serve as the key solution to this challenge. With observability, an IT team can understand and diagnose issues in complex systems, allowing them to detect and resolve problems quickly. The telemetry data such as metrics, logs, and traces observed from the environment will provide compelling data to monitor and analyse these systems in real time.

What major problems of ITOM can observability solve?

Bottlenecks while modernising your application stack:

With observability, the quality of applications can be kept under check while application modernisation and legacy transformation are adapted. You can compare and analyse your application behaviour by setting benchmarks and manage configuration changes that happen on the application level. Observability will also give you deeper visibility into application performance and availability, along with easier troubleshooting.

Difficulties in improving digital experience and business IT resilience:

Full-stack observability of your IT environment will facilitate issue identification in real time and accelerate problem remediation. A fully observable network can be utilised to help maintain the order in which services function and maintain crucial SLAs. You can design and develop strategies for complete observability of highly resilient applications, and implement end-user application performance monitoring using the proper tools to ensure customer expectations are met.

Hindrances with adapting to cloud-native applications:

Cloud-native applications operate on distributed microservice environments that are dynamic in nature. In this case, observability is the only way to achieve maximum visibility, and it is done by analysing how, when, and where problems exist. In dynamic IT networks, observability can help you with mapping and resource allocation, making interrelated functioning possible. At the same time, it facilitates seamless automation deployments for applications. Observability also gives you the upper hand when it comes to identifying where and why a distributed application has broken down, and fixing it, with root cause analysis.

Threat intrusions and problems with predictive analysis:

The telemetry data obtained is analysed to curate threat detection techniques, which in turn serves to forecast interruptions and pinpoint errors that affect your application performance. Network admins can leverage observability to get continuous feedback in the form of logs and reports, and use advanced machine learning capabilities linked with full network observability to predict any upcoming mishaps.

Anomaly detection and troubleshooting obstructions:

By monitoring systems and applications in real time, observability can help identify issues before they become major problems. This allows IT teams to identify the root cause of problems, troubleshoot them quickly, and prevent network downtime. This can reduce the time and resources required to resolve issues and improve overall system performance.

How can IT admins benefit from a smart observability platform?

You can only create a completely observable environment if observability is incorporated into your core network architecture. In an existing network stack or application model, the only easy way to achieve observability is to employ an observability solution that has capabilities to understand a dynamic environment, predict issues, and devise plans for easier troubleshooting. The benefits of a full-stack observability platform include:

1. Predictive forecasting and system reliability: Observability can help organisations proactively predict and prevent issues before they arise. They remain agile and competitive while improving the overall system reliability by gaining real-time insights into their systems’ health and performance.
2. Better inter-team collaboration: Observability allows IT teams to share data and collaborate more effectively.
3. Real-time insights into system and application performance: Observability can help IT teams respond more quickly to changing requirements or business needs.
4. Increase efficiency: Observability platforms can help organisations optimise their systems and applications for peak performance, by analysing data from across multiple stacks and horizons. Organisations can identify inefficiencies and make targeted improvements to better development and delivery of the application.
5. Accelerate innovation: By gaining real-time insights into how their systems are performing, organisations can quickly identify areas where they can innovate and improve their offerings. This can help them stay ahead of the competition and deliver better customer experiences.

If you are in the market for a smart observability platform, OpManager Plus’ IT observability suite may be just what your business needs. OpManager Plus is a holistic IT operations management solution with the advantages of AIOPs and pragmatic observability. ManageEngine’s ITOM suite also offers dedicated solutions for streamlining network monitoring, server monitoring, application monitoring, bandwidth monitoring, configuration management, firewall security and compliance, and IP address and switch port management. This is why ManageEngine’s ITOM solutions are chosen by over one million IT admins worldwide.

Image credit: iStock.com/ArtemisDiana