Five executive blind spots solved by observability in hybrid and multi-cloud environments

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

Kubernetes, containerization, serverless architecture, cloud, microservices, and open-source databases have abstracted away underlying network and hardware complexity.

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.