Making the digital business observable

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, making your digital business observable is more crucial than ever. According to Gartner’s “Innovation Insight for Observability” report, observability requires examining the full stack of data within an organization. 

Relying on isolated data layers creates a fragmented view, which can hinder a company's ability to remain competitive.

Let’s delve into the concept of observability, through the lens of Gartner’s insights, and explore how to enhance your digital business with effective business observability strategies.

What is observability?

Gartner defines observability as:

The evolution of monitoring into a process that offers insight into digital business applications, speeds innovation and enhances customer experience. I&O leaders should use observability to extend current monitoring capabilities, processes, and culture to deliver these benefits.

Observability is not just about monitoring; it’s about gaining real-time insights into your system’s health and performance. However, there’s no single agreed-upon definition of observability in the industry, which leads to confusion when I&O leaders try to compare and evaluate observability tools.

Despite this, it’s universally accepted that distributed system architectures increase the need for observability tools. These architectures are complex, often involving multiple, disparate systems interacting with each other, and observability helps DevOps professionals analyze the state and behavior of these systems.

Additionally, with the massive amounts of data processed by organizations today, observability tools powered by AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) have become essential. These tools use machine learning to identify patterns in system data and detect incidents that could disrupt business continuity, such as network outages or cyberattacks.

What is an observable digital business?

An observable digital business is one where systems can be monitored holistically, even if they exist in silos. Observability allows you to view how all systems behave in real-time and proactively monitor for potential incidents, such as cyber-attacks, natural disasters, or insider threats.

In an observable business, you can quickly address issues like downtime, service outages, and data breaches, ensuring smooth operations and minimizing negative impacts on your customers.

Key use cases of observability for digital businesses:

• Improved End-User Experience: With enhanced observability, you can detect system issues faster, which improves application uptime and performance. This results in better customer satisfaction, reduced churn, and increased client retention.
• Reduced Infrastructure Costs: Observability helps optimize infrastructure by reducing overprovisioning, streamlining throughput, and cutting down the workload for DevOps teams. This leads to more efficient use of resources and lower operational costs.
• Better Integration with Development Processes: Following observability-driven development (ODD) ensures that both development and operations teams are aligned on application performance and reliability. This unified approach leads to smoother deployments and fewer issues in production environments.
• Improved Time to Market: An observable business can diagnose and resolve issues faster, especially in complex environments. This accelerates the release of new application features, allowing you to meet customer expectations and beat competitors to market.
• Optimized Modern Architecture Coverage: Observability emphasizes the importance of data collection and telemetry across all system components, including microservices and containers. This supports modern architectural paradigms and ensures full visibility into system performance.

How to make your digital business more observable

To improve observability, invest in the right observability product that provides real-time metrics on your IT systems. These tools should collect and visualize data from various sources, including logs, metrics, traces, APIs, and customer experience (CX) data. By analyzing this data in context, observability tools can help you make informed decisions that directly impact business outcomes.

Popular observability platforms such as Datadog, Grafana, Dynatrace, AWS Cloud Ops, and New Relic offer comprehensive solutions to monitor the full stack of your IT infrastructure. These tools enable you to track system performance across multiple domains, ensuring seamless operation and improved business observability.

Additionally, Gartner suggests that observability solutions should not just evaluate infrastructure data but also encompass business KPIs, social media sentiment, and IT service management (ITSM) data. This holistic approach to observability enables organizations to gain deeper insights into the overall health of their digital ecosystem.

AIOps and observability

To achieve full digital business observability, tools should leverage AIOps capabilities. AIOps uses machine learning to identify patterns in high-cardinality data sets, which are essential for understanding the complexities of modern digital systems. By correlating information from multiple data points, AIOps allows teams to predict and prevent system issues before they occur.

Traditional monitoring tools cannot provide automated insights, which makes it challenging to detect potential system failures. In contrast, AIOps-enabled observability tools enhance data visualization, improve anomaly detection, and help you identify the root cause of issues like outages or performance degradation.

As Gartner notes; 

“The key for observability tools is to spot anomalies relevant to the problem at hand, and link related data from log files and metrics. By surfacing this information in context, operators can quickly isolate the root cause of problems.”

Steps to add observability to your digital business

1. Examine the Full Data Stack: To fully realize the benefits of observability, you need to analyze all layers of your organization’s data. This includes logs, telemetry data, business KPIs, and user experience data. A comprehensive observability tool will help you visualize this data and provide actionable insights.
2. Choose the Right Observability Product: Not all tools are created equal. Select a tool that fits your business observability needs, with features like real-time metrics, AIOps integration, and multi-system monitoring. Tools like Dynatrace and Datadog are known for offering full-stack observability, allowing you to see the big picture and detect issues early.
3. Partner with Experts: Working with a consultancy that understands observability can help you find the right technologies and vendors. Experts can provide valuable insights into how to optimize your digital business for observability, ensuring your IT and DevOps teams are equipped to handle any challenges.

Conclusion

In today’s digital-first world, ensuring your digital business is fully observable is key to maintaining competitiveness and driving success. By investing in the right observability tools, leveraging AIOps for deeper insights, and examining your full data stack, you can enhance performance, reduce downtime, and improve customer satisfaction.

At Adservio, we help businesses make their digital operations more observable and efficient. Contact us and let’s discover how we can support your journey to full digital business observability.