Amid accelerated digitalization and expanded office network perimeters, IT leaders need to ramp up real-time network visibility and performance.
If you are a technologist today, chances are you are probably under more pressure than ever to deliver seamless and intuitive digital experiences for customers and employees.
The pandemic has compelled organizations to accelerate their digital transformation plans within a shortened time frame in order to maintain operations and meet customer needs during these challenging and unpredictable times.
The rapid transformation, and in particular, the sharp acceleration in cloud computing initiatives, has left technologists managing a sprawling IT estate across a patchwork of legacy and cloud technologies. And, as we all know, this has brought with it spiraling levels of complexity within the IT department.
As technologists attempt to manage an increasingly complex IT estate, what are the key areas and metrics that they need to monitor in order to optimize performance, deliver faultless digital experiences and drive rapid digital transformation?
Here are the top five priorities when it comes to monitoring IT performance in 2021:
- Centralized metrics, logs, event and traces for whole IT ecosystem
Build a platform that is capable of receiving data from multiple sources to accurately represent topologies and dependencies across the entire IT estate. This is vital for operations teams to work together and collaborate around data to minimize Fault Domain Isolation (FDI) and reduce mean time to repair (MTTR). Cross-domain analytics spanning the entire IT stack allow technologists to identify the source of issues regardless of where it is in the stack, whether it is an application code issue or an infrastructure issue.
- Applications and services health
There is a need to monitor the health of applications and services and their impact on user experience and business outcomes in real-time. This is absolutely critical to deliver the digital experiences that customers and employees need during the pandemic era. For many organizations, the digital experience is at the heart of the business, and IT teams need complete clarity into the health and performance of resources at all times.
- Network and infrastructure health
It is critical to know the health of the network and infrastructure (traditional, cloud or WAN) and then be able to see if a performance issue or outage will have an impact on important applications and services. This is essential to isolate the root causes of more issues and perform fixes before they impact more end users.
- Prioritizing issues and tickets on user and business impacts
Develop a way to link IT performance issues with business outcomes, such as customer experience, sales transactions and revenue. By contextualizing IT data with real-time business metrics, IT teams can prioritize fixes based on what matters most to customers and the business. In doing so, they can measure and report on the impact of every IT decision and action, demonstrating the value of their actions to the broader organization.
- A unified end-to-end transactional view
IT needs a single, unified observability platform to monitor the full technology stack, instead of the often multiple, disjointed monitoring solutions, upon which the majority of IT departments still rely today. This is necessary to easily connect the dots up and down the stack, from customer or employee-facing applications all the way down to the lowest level infrastructure, such as compute, storage, network and public internet—and inter-services’ dependencies to easily understand causes and locations of incidents and sub-performance.
Monitoring your IT Stack
Not having genuine visibility and insight into the performance of the whole technology stack can lead to difficulties prioritizing IT actions, create silos across the organization, and cause the loss of customers and revenue due to IT health and performance issues.
IT leadership also need a business perspective on full-stack observability to pinpoint the most critical data and contextualize IT performance insights with real-time business data. Directly linking technology performance to end user experience and business outcomes is where technologists will feel maximum benefit from these new technologies.
Only then, can they prioritize actions and innovation based on what really matters the most to the business: ensuring optimized performance while delivering smooth digital experiences.
