Observability Across Different Teams

Observability Across Different Teams

Ninety percent of organizations are currently practicing observability, with the adoption of this methodology mainly increasing among DevOps, site reliability engineering (SRE), and IT service management (ITSM) teams.

However, observability is now a more attainable goal for other types of teams, allowing them to determine the health of a system based solely on knowledge of its external outputs. Gartner's report "Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2023: Applied Observability” focuses on three types of teams that are currently driving observability outcomes for their organizations. We examine the benefits of observability for these teams in further detail below.

Infrastructure and operations teams

Infrastructure and operations (I&O) team leaders use observability to generate additional context about system monitoring. Traditional monitoring tools provide end users with dashboards and alerts to identify system issues as they occur.

Observability tools build on this concept by providing visibility into the overall state of a system rather than focusing on a system's components. That can result in a more comprehensive and holistic overview of system health, allowing I&O leaders to proactively deal with issues that might jeopardize a company's future, such as cyberattacks and outages. 

Gartner says in its report:

Observability enables I&O leaders to reduce the time it takes to identify the root cause of performance-impacting problems in the infrastructure operations layer.

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This is largely because observability platforms gather telemetry data, such as logs, traces, dependencies, and metrics. These tools provide I&O leaders with contextual data that uncovers system performance issues and their root causes. Traditional system monitoring data tools will only provide this context, making them inferior for data-driven I&O teams responsible for a company's IT infrastructure. 

Software engineering teams

Some software engineering teams are using a process called observability-driven development or ODD. According to Gartner, this approach:

"Provides fine-grained visibility and context into system state and behavior by designing systems to be observable."

ODD involves instrumenting code and using external data to understand a system's internal state. This enables software engineering teams to identify and resolve system and application performance issues early in the development process. Since observability provides detailed data, problems can be solved more quickly compared to traditional monitoring tools.

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Though observability-driven development is still an emerging practice, it allows software engineering teams to build systems that are easier to understand and troubleshoot. Additionally, these observable systems help engineers meet service-level objectives (SLOs), service-level agreements (SLAs), and service-level indicators (SLIs).

By identifying the root causes of system failures early, engineers can also prevent data security breaches and performance issues like latency and reliability. Engineers can further enhance observability by using tools such as Grafana and Prometheus, which generate real-time reports, charts, and dashboards that display system performance data.

These tools provide a single source of truth for system insights, empowering software engineers to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) and workflows effectively.

Data engineering teams

Traditional monitoring tools often rely on historical data and metrics, which can sometimes lead to inaccurate assumptions about system health. This is where data engineering teams benefit from data observability, a subset of observability that focuses on visualizing data pipelines, infrastructure, and dependencies in real-time.

Gartner highlights that observability at the business layer improves latency because data observability enables data engineering teams to uncover and resolve data outages faster. End-to-end data observability helps teams identify potential data quality issues, improve performance, and enhance capacity planning through automation.

By minimizing downtime and enhancing data quality, data engineering teams can meet SLAs and improve customer satisfaction. Data observability also plays a key role in data governance, ensuring that data remains compliant with industry standards and regulations.

Other teams that practice observability

It's not just I&O, software engineering teams, and data engineering teams adopting observability. Other teams, such as data science, marketing, and sales, are integrating observability into their workflows to improve system health.

• ‍Data Science Teams: By monitoring system health, data scientists can prevent issues that might affect data pipelines, safeguarding data compliance and security.

• ‍Marketing Teams: Marketers rely on large data sets across various systems. Observability ensures data integrity and quality during campaigns and customer communications.

• ‍Sales Teams: Sales teams use observability tools to monitor customer relationship management (CRM) systems, helping them avoid system failures that could disrupt sales campaigns.
  

The benefits of observability for different teams

While SRE, ITSM, and DevOps teams are the most prominent users of observability, I&O, software engineering teams, and data engineering teams are also benefiting from their capabilities. These teams can quickly troubleshoot and resolve system issues in real-time, boosting their operational efficiency and improving system performance.

As more teams adopt observability into their processes, organizations can enhance compliance with data governance regulations and meet SLA objectives. The result is a more resilient business, with improved service reliability and customer satisfaction.

At Adservio, we specialize in helping organizations implement the right observability solutions for their diverse teams. Contact us today to learn how we can help you improve system health, boost performance, and meet your SLA and SLO goals with the latest technologies and strategies.