Why Full-Stack Observability Should Be a Priority as Enterprises Face the Next Wave of Innovation
Over the last two years, technologists have come under unprecedented pressure to embrace digital transformation and innovation at record speeds. The pandemic accelerated the expansion of the digital economy at a rate that was previously unthinkable.
As a consequence, consistent availability and performance of the applications and digital services that customers and end users rely upon has never been more important. But at the same time, this has never been harder to achieve. To facilitate rapid innovation many technology leaders turbo-charged their move to the cloud and now preside over increasingly complex IT environments and sprawling cloud infrastructure.
Now the clock is ticking for IT teams to get control over their IT environments and achieve the level of visibility and insight needed to manage the next wave of digital change.
Full-stack observability is quickly emerging as a technology that can help solve some of these challenging and complex issues. The latest report from AppDynamics, The Journey to Observability, reveals a surge of organizations making serious moves to improve visibility within their IT environment with as many as 90% of organizations planning to be somewhere along the journey to full-stack observability during 2022.The next 12 months will be pivotal for many in this journey. Here we explore three important reasons why full-stack observability should be in every IT team’s toolkit as they prepare for the next wave of innovation.
Combat complexity, achieve real-time visibility
It’s no secret that there has been a massive increase in complexity for IT departments in the last few years as the world shifted online. The result is they were left to manage increasingly fragmented IT estates as they rushed to keep application and digital experiences running.
Technologists have been overwhelmed by data noise and have not had the tools readily available to identify which issues really matter and where to focus their efforts. But as we enter a new phase where immediate reactive response to the pandemic has evolved to proactive planning for the future, technologists need to find a way to tame complexity and manage data noise. Full-stack observability is enabling them to be more strategic in their approach.
This technology provides users with unified, real-time visibility into availability and performance up and down the IT stack for compute, storage, network and public internet, from the customer-facing application all the way into the back end. It enables IT teams to quickly and easily identify anomalies, understand dependencies and fix issues before they affect customers.
And the results are clear to see. Organizations that have already started the move to a full-stack observability approach are seeing results and clear return on investment (ROI). In the AppDynamics research, 86% of technologists reported greater visibility across their IT stack over the last 12 months when implementing full-stack observability.
Reduce costs with improved productivity and collaboration
When we look more deeply at the specific benefits that early adopters of full-stack observability are seeing, it’s clear that ROI and reduction in costs are achieved in a number of ways.
Half of IT teams say that a full-stack observability approach has led to improved productivity and 46% have reduced operational costs in the IT department as they now need to spend less time identifying anomalies and understanding dependencies in order to perform fixes. Others say they can also deploy team members to more strategic work that can better impact the business. 43% explain that they have seen better collaboration between IT operations, development and networking teams as they now have a single source of truth for data. No more working in silos with independent, disconnected monitoring tools.
Customers tell us they are removing themselves from the constant cycle of firefighting that has characterized most IT departments in recent years. Teams are becoming more productive and operational costs are falling because availability and performance issues are being addressed earlier and more quickly.
Against this backdrop of success, it perhaps shouldn’t be surprising that 80% of technologists believe that organizations that fail to make significant strides in their journey towards full-stack observability in 2022 will face competitive disadvantage versus their peers.
Impact business outcomes
But where full-stack observability really comes into its own is when technology performance is directly linked to the most important business metrics. In fact, 98% of technologists believe that it’s important to be able to directly correlate performance across the full IT stack with business outcomes.
Full-stack observability with business context enables companies to digest IT performance to easily identify where they can prioritize performance and tackle issues that strategically impact their bottom line. This correlation of technology and business data allows IT leaders to make smarter, strategic decisions based on actual business impact.
Making the shift is absolutely critical in order for businesses to successfully embed a sustainable digital-transformation-as-usual culture across their operations to thrive in the post-pandemic economy.
And critically, whereas before IT teams may have had to battle to get buy-in from senior leaders for procuring new technology solutions — such as full-stack observability — business leaders are now huge advocates. 93% of technologists report that the wider business has been supportive of their efforts to implement full-stack observability, in terms of providing the necessary budget and resources.
This is a hugely significant development in the evolution of full-stack observability, suggesting that technologists are now well positioned to ramp up their implementation programs with the sponsorship and investment they need to deliver success.
It’s clear that the implementation of full-stack observability will be mission-critical for technologists as they shift gears and ramp up transformation programs. A full-stack observability approach is central to technologists delivering their organization’s future objectives, enabling them to be more strategic, prioritize resources and influence vital and strategic decisions that drive the bottom line.