Monitoring and Observability Comes of Age

Information Technology (IT) Observability is much harder than you imagine:

I have listed some of them below:

• Separate Teams and isolated Data Silos
• Cloud-native Apps, trying to monitor modern apps via legacy tools
• Increasing Application Complexity and interdependencies

Let's rewind the clock to the mid-1990's, where traditional network monitoring systems (NMS), many of which were built for that era were bloated and required a full staff just to effectively run. These legacy tools have struggled to adapt to the evolving landscape of Hybrid enterprise infrastructure and keep up with technological advancements without dragging existing technical debt.

While the journey to the hybrid cloud is often undertaken with promises of reduced costs and enhanced insights. However, reality presents challenges, including burgeoning expenses and persistent visibility gaps. As your organization navigates this crucial transition, unified observability emerges as a non-negotiable requirement for success.

The end result regardless, if you are monitoring an Information Technology (IT) and or  Operational Technology (OT) environments is too many alerts. Your job is to sift through all the noise and find the signal, then react!

Navigating cloud migration:

Modern Monitoring and Observability can unlock cloud cost control and while unlocking additional visibility. Is it time to optimize your alerting strategy?

The quest for comprehensive observability across diverse IT ecosystems intensifies as enterprises expedite their cloud migration. Visibility gaps can lead to delayed troubleshooting and unpredictable costs, impeding operational efficiency.

Regardless, if its the C-level leaders constantly seek ways to optimize cloud efficiency and control costs or the rack-n-stack knuckle draggers tired of getting blamed for outages!

Symptoms

• Costly war rooms with lots of finger pointing
• Alert overload / fatigue
• Swivel chair syndrome - point at someone to go resolve it and then when they come back with no result... point at someone else!
• Poor customer experience (CX)

Modern Monitoring & Observability Results are impressive which stem from FinOps Start very high level, with origins in 2019. FinOps attempt to run IT as a business unit with cost optimization monitored and modifications made at each stage of IT lifecycle.
I detail some out below:

• Right sizing platform and app sizing
• Reduction in Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR)
• Improved operational insight
• Proactive problem detection for seamless service continuity

Where does one turn to find such offerings? There are commercial off the shelf (AKA CoTS) and Open Source products out there, and to vast to cover in this short little blog. All of the offerings should drive an end result of... Accurate data in context for all teams is a huge ask however, modern Monitoring & Observability bring this closer to reality!   Add in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and you have yourself a mix of AIOps - an example is Apptio’s offerings with IBM’s IT automation portfolio and watson.x AI platform

Summary 

You need a Future-Proof approach to monitoring and observability regardless of industry and practice. This will more than likely consist of AI enabled toolsets and FinOps approaches. We all must be accountable for full lifecycle cost optimizations. Which is a never ending battle; whose ready?

Disclaimer: I am not representing any products of vendors during this blog discussion!