The digital enterprise is inundated with alerts and disjointed analytics, creating challenges for accessing actionable insights and cost/complexity management

In the course of frantic continual digital transformation, organizations have been leveraging hybrid and multi-cloud deployments—all while supporting existing, traditional workloads and systems.

As a result, these complex, diverse, and distributed environments have caused different teams to amass multitudes of overlapping monitoring and management tools. According to Gartner, “for overlapping toolsets—many enterprises already have upward of 15 monitoring tools and do not wish to add further complexity.”

The problem involves an overload of alerts and disjointed analytics; difficulties in accessing actionable insights to identify, prioritize, and resolve business-critical issues; and cumbersome management of the disparate tools, which can increase costs and operational and business risks.

How should organizations benefitting from digital transformation address this emergent issue? The answer is to ensure maximum cloud observability.

Visibility Isn’t the Same as Observability

In cloud network management, observability picks up where visibility leaves off. Beyond just having the sensors and detection algorithms to present the status of a cloud network and let teams take reactive actions, observability involves a comprehensive set of other critical signals designed to allow administrators to see the system state with less noise and take informed proactive and predictive measures.

A good observability system helps teams in the following strategic actions:

    • Inferring system health from external outputs
    • Correlating metrics across technology stacks
    • Automating alerts and opening of incident tickets with minimal false alarms
    • Using AIOps and machine learning to identify anomalies
    • Providing actionable guidance to management on issue resolution
    • Speeding up and improving operations through ease of use and empowerment of more teams to benefit from enhanced reporting, analytics, and the resultant observability

When an organization suffices with just a visibility framework, it can run into this situation: a system is visibly healthy but system performance isn’t ideal, and the available visible data doesn’t provide guidance on how to fix the problem.

With a good observability system in place, however, administrators are provided with end-to-end oversight of service delivery and component dependencies in the hybrid cloud. Tech pros gain single-pane-of-glass monitoring with actionable intelligence to expedite problem resolution and enable proactive management. Such a fully integrated view can help teams identify and diagnose service issues, determine their root cause, and flag potential security threats with greater efficiency than ever before.

For example, with a standard visibility framework, if a virtualization host is running at more than 90% CPU utilization, alerts will be raised to the entire IT division. Techs will rush to find the cause, determine the increase was due to the planned addition of two more VMs to the host, and declare it was all a false alarm. This noise has already wasted two hours of four IT staff members’ time they could have better spent on other duties.

With a smart observability framework in place, the system would send a message to only the most relevant techs about the issue and provide historical statistics, offer possible causes for the increase in CPU utilization, and suggest solutions to avert alert fatigue whenever such “expected CPU utilization increases” recur.

Say Goodbye to Alert Fatigue and Hello to Agile Business

Listening to customers, Kasturi has ensured his firm’s new solution, SolarWinds® Hybrid Cloud Observability, offers a full-stack solution built to help organizations continuously improve performance, availability, security, and digital experience across complex, diverse, and distributed hybrid and cloud environments.

Kasturi has built upon the company’s 20 years of digital transformation consultancy to help customers boost observability and thereby do the following:

    • Accelerate issue resolution with actionable intelligence: The solution’s full-stack and integrated coverage helps IT teams make faster and more informed, coordinated, and effective decisions. Users can readily discover, map, and understand dependencies to predict and prevent user experience degradation and service outages.
    • Ensure high service levels to increase IT efficiency and business agility: Hybrid Cloud Observability helps teams meet service levels and more efficiently conduct problem resolution, configuration, reporting, and planning tasks, freeing up time for IT teams to focus on more impactful activities to advance the business. Armed with correlated intelligence, teams can more efficiently do the following:
        • Identify, prioritize, and resolve problems and anomalies
        • Reduce compliance and attack surface risks
        • Accurately determine where best to scale performance and capacity
    • Benefit from a low cost of ownership: Enterprises gain centralized oversight to optimize on-premises and cloud resource costs with a unified solution built to simplify and improve cloud migration efforts. The suite approach allows organizations to cost-effectively start and extend Hybrid Cloud Observability across hybrid and cloud environments with a unified experience, deployment, scalability, and support—offering a low total cost of ownership.

Customers already on the firm’s Orion® Platform can try out the enhanced Hybrid Cloud Observability, and once they see the benefits, they can enjoy a simplified licensing model with more flexible pricing and packaging: purchase one subscription license to cover all nodes, and deploy the access in the best way for their organization.