In 2021, Observability became a leading technology trend, and there are currently no signs of its popularity slowing down in 2023.
Last year, many businesses made concerted efforts to better understand the value of Observability. Leading technology research firms applauded its potential impact to simplify increasingly complex IT environments. Analysts predicted a bright future for the technology, with some suggesting Observability adoption would increase at a compound annual growth 8.2%.
Based on these and other developments, there is evidence that 2023 will be the year Observability achieves mainstream understanding and adoption.
However, despite this positive momentum, organisations continue to show a lack of understanding around the technology—with questions ranging from why they should consider implementing Observability, to what Observability even is.
With that in mind, here are four simple questions designed to help demystify Observability.
WHAT is Observability?
Observability is often described as the evolution of monitoring—a technology that has been incredibly valuable for many organisations for years. With monitoring, organisations have gathered comprehensive data from across their computer systems and digital services to identify problems with their applications, performance issues related to the databases they use, and much more. With Observability, on the other hand, organisations can now not only collect this data, but also receive actionable intelligence needed to effectively solve these problems.
Observability solutions can automatically analyse massive amounts of information across a business’s entire computer system, which is often made up of a complex network of applications, databases, clouds, and more. With Observability, users can pinpoint causes of outages or performance issues affecting their digital services and receive actionable insights to act on and resolve these problems quickly. Modern Observability solutions—which contain advanced AI and Machine Learning capabilities—can even use this information to predict and proactively prevent problems before they occur.
WHO benefits from Observability?
Technology teams today are often overworked and understaffed, and all of them could use some help. Observability has shown to be a particularly important tool for many different teams, including but not limited to IT operations, DevOps, database administrators, and security operations teams. With Observability, these technical staff have a powerful solution that proactively provides analysis and insights to quickly and efficiently identify and resolve problems and optimise the performance of their company’s digital services.
This proactivity reduces the amount of time teams spend analysing data and reactively resolving problems. In turn, these different technology teams can focus on more productive work. For IT managers, this can mean a renewed focus on achieving service-level agreements. Developers can again focus on innovating and creating exciting applications. Meanwhile, security teams can focus on preventing digital threats.
WHY is Observability so important?
Organisations today rely on countless applications, infrastructures, databases, and remote workforces to get business done.
This has resulted in complex “hybrid” IT environments and computer systems that are far too complicated for humans to manage. Technology teams have difficulty seeing across these environments, meaning that when a problem arises, it may take longer to identify and solve. The result can be applications that are not working or services that are not available, which can be costly.
To remain competitive, companies today need their computer systems, applications, and services to be highly performing and highly available, and Observability has emerged as an invaluable tool to ensure this. With Observability, businesses can simplify the management of their computer systems to ensure excellent experiences for customers, employees, and partners.
The result is reduced costs, optimised performance, and improved operational resiliency.
HOW do I evolve from existing monitoring tools to Observability?
For organisations that are already leveraging monitoring solutions, IT leaders should start by detailing which tools and processes their business has in place. This will allow technology teams to determine where there are gaps and how Observability solutions can help fill them in. Companies should not feel they need to replace their current monitoring technologies but instead can use Observability to supplement their practices.
One concern that organisations have when considering implementing Observability is which additional cloud-native architectures or technologies their businesses may adopt in the future. Thankfully, modern Observability solutions are designed to help companies regardless of where they are on their cloud journeys, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid model.
Ultimately, Observability provides solutions fit for every company, regardless of how distributed their applications, databases, and services are, where they run, or how often they change, and 2023 is the year to embrace it.
