Monitoring still plays a critical role in any IT environment, but we need observability to solve common blind spots executives face in today’s cloud environment.
Those of us in IT hear a lot about observability these days. And it’s no wonder— given how complex environments have become, the promise of a holistic approach to monitoring offering a more complete, insightful, and visual analysis of one’s environments is intriguing.
THE NEXT WAVE OF OBSERVABILITY DEFINED
What makes observability so important? Think of it like Google Maps™. At face value, the app shows you thousands of discrete data points: street names, restaurants, businesses, etc. In and of themselves, they’re standalone points. If, however, you want to get from A to B, Google Maps shows you the fastest, most efficient way to note traffic, construction, or other obstacles and paint a complete picture of your journey ahead.
In the same way, siloed teams hold discrete data points within their monitoring panes, but they only tell part of their environment’s story. Observability pulls all these data points together to provide a complete picture of your environment—and more importantly, it offers faster insights into component relationships, deviations, and dependencies. Adding artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) speeds up the process with automated analytics, actionable intelligence, and predictive recommendations.
MONITORING YOUR WAY TO OBSERVABILITY
Monitoring still plays a critical role in any IT environment. But monitoring alone can’t help you arrive at your destination. Enterprises already recognize this. By 2024, Gartner® estimates 30% of enterprises with cloud-based architectures will deploy observability techniques, up from just 10% in 2020.
This article explores ways observability can solve common blind spots executives face across their hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments when they rely solely on traditional monitoring tools.
IT Market Trends
Six primary market trends are happening in IT, each tied into one another in some way, shape, or form.
Modernization of Apps and Databases
Modernization of Operations
With the modernization of apps and databases, IT operations have become even more modern and complex. The takeaway here is software deployment is happening so rapidly, and errors will continuously occur. This has accelerated the use of AIOps.
The Changing Nature of Networking
Network fabrics are stretched to the limit supporting a vast number of new endpoints, devices, and hybrid workplace patterns. As a result, the edge, the internet of things (IoT), 5G, Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), and SD-WAN are becoming critical trends to watch.
The Need for Full-Stack Management
When problems occur, it’s usually the result of an issue with complex integration. The key part of effective diagnosis is full-stack visibility so issues can be addressed quickly
Legacy Toolsets Ineffective in Tackling Challenges
If you think you can solve 21st-century problems with 20th-century infrastructure, you’re in for a surprise. Legacy toolsets simply won’t cut it when it comes to handling today’s complex IT challenges.
Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Explosion
Of all the IT trends outlined here, the move to hybrid IT and multi-cloud environments is perhaps the most important. With infrastructure, apps, and data spread across silos, organizations seeking agility, on-demand services, and faster time to market are embracing the cloud at a dizzying rate.
Now that we’ve established the IT market trends and how to approach observability, let’s jump into how organizational leaders can adopt observability and eliminate common blind spots.
BLIND SPOT NO. 1: No Single Source of Truth
Disparate tools often lead to missed alerts and low cross-team collaboration. The result? No single source of truth on which executives can rely, meaning inconsistent, error-prone responses and poor service delivery.
Observability enables proactive management and better digital experience through real-time and predictive intelligence, thus fostering collaboration.
BLIND SPOT NO. 2: Unfocused Automation and Remediation
Manual tasks can be prone to human error and often become the root cause of issues. Though automation has been a point of discussion for years, today, there’s a whole new set of automation systems to learn.
Observability—combined with AIOps and machine learning—can speed up the process with automated analytics, actionable intelligence, and predictive recommendations.
BLIND SPOT NO. 3: Shallow Operational Views
The biggest issue with too many tools is perhaps excessive alert noise, which creates inefficient ITOps and low productivity when teams don’t know where to start or prioritize.
Observability helps reduce alert noise. It also helps teams visually assemble disparate data points into a complete and detailed picture of your environment that’s continuously visualized and analyzed to ensure business service delivery.
BLIND SPOT NO. 4: Cost Inefficiency
Monitoring tool sprawl increases overhead and licensing fees—and wastes budget. Plus, it requires more people across multiple domains to maintain and run these tools.
Observability reduces costs and speeds time to value by giving your teams faster insights into component relationships, deviations, and dependencies.
BLIND SPOT NO. 5: Patchwork Visibility
Monitoring is typically domain-focused and primarily for on-premises data centers. With hybrid and multi-cloud adoption (and complexity) exploding, blind spots can occur, resulting in wasted CapEx and OpEx.
Observability provides deep visibility across massive real-time and historic metrics, logs, and trace data, as well as collaboration across ITOps, DevOps, and security teams.
Conclusion
Looking across the tech ecosystem, a few things are clear.
First, the chatter and buzz around observability are palpable. Numerous vendors in the market right now are defining the term and what it means to them.
Second, a solid monitoring foundation helps deliver great observability. Tying the two together and creating a complete picture of your environment is what’s important.
Finally, what was defined as observability in the past isn’t what observability is today.
With SolarWinds® Observability, we offer organizations of all sizes and verticals a comprehensive, integrated, cost-effective, full-stack solution. It starts from the bottom up and meets you where you are. Let us help you remove the blind spots to see the full picture around you.
Interested to learn more about how observability is the future of monitoring? Download a free trial here of SolarWinds’ new Hybrid Cloud Observability solution that caters to all stages of a cloud transformation journey.
