While IT pros know they need to monitor IT services, they also know it can be the most difficult part of their job. Traditionally, enterprises have cobbled together several disparate monitoring products to address all their monitoring needs – but there are often gaps. Within these gaps, issues are missed, and the possibility of proactive issue resolution becomes nearly impossible.
Digital transformations and the adoption of cloud also add complexity to network and application environments because existing network monitoring products on the market often don’t support modern applications and frameworks. As a result, customer experience, as well as business performance, is suffering.
However, there is a solution to this problem. To ensure customers receive the highest-quality digital experience they deserve, businesses can future-proof their software by using full-stack observability. In this post, I’ll dive deeper into how observability can help with the monitoring challenges of today and prepare you for the future of your IT.
Monitoring vs. Observability
While monitoring your network and applications was sufficient to manage IT in the past, modern complexities demand a new approach. New monitoring techniques introduced to the market address some of these issues. However, leveraging observability can be far more beneficial to IT teams to guarantee operational resilience as IT systems grow more dynamic and networked. To understand “why observability,” it is helpful to define the overall approach of observability compared to monitoring.
You can differentiate between observability and monitoring by making a distinction: monitoring suggests knowing what you are looking for, the “known knowns” and “known unknowns.” In other words, you're monitoring for anomalies easily detected. On the other hand, observability goes a step further and enables the identification of the “unknown unknowns.” Observability is a data-centric approach leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to speed issue to resolution times and support proactive identification and resolution of issues.
By measuring to comprehend a system's internal states from its external outputs, observability is a novel monitoring strategy developed to supplement rule-based monitoring. However, monitoring does not replace observability. Rather, it can improve resource and application performance monitoring throughout hybrid and cloud-based applications. Monitoring can also assist you in managing, but observability allows you to organize data and applications, providing even more clarity into your environment. To quickly give a comprehensive picture of an IT stack's operation and performance, observability can automatically monitor all software and infrastructure performance, metrics, events, logs, and traces in real time.
Benefits of Observability
Observability focuses on instrumenting every application and infrastructure component to track a vital set of KPIs for the applications and infrastructure's health. Analysis of long-term trends can be used to utilize Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML) to proactively identify possible issues. Using these centralize observability insights, departments across an organization can be better informed when performing root cause analysis and resolving issues, which can result in reduced downtime and an improved user experience
Accurately identifying problems and anomalies across hybrid cloud infrastructure and applications is crucial competence for IT operations and other teams. With full-stack monitoring for early event identification, observability can also help deliver faster issue resolution times and speed your
transition to AIOps.
Challenges Observability Helps Solve
Observability is more than simply a fancy name for monitoring.
Gartner recognizes observability as a major trend in the industry to solve existing monitoring issues. Expecting that by 2024, 30% of enterprises implementing distributed system architectures will have adopted observability techniques to improve digital business service performance.
Without observability, you cannot:
- Navigate increased complexities of multi-cloud environments
- Boost operational effectiveness and mass-produce high-quality software
- Identify and resolve potential issues quickly
- Ensure performance and uptime
- Recognize fluctuations in the performance of your digital business in real-time
- Have investment efficiency
The complexity of new application designs utilizing open mainframe services is increasing, which makes it harder for monitoring tools to gather more information and offer deeper insights into these new workloads. If monitoring is not modernized, customers may experience needless outages. Observability is designed to address these monitoring inefficiencies.
Hybrid Approach to AIOps Offers Additional Benefits
Amidst increasingly complex cloud environments and overwhelming disruptions, SolarWinds aims to provide the best solutions to quickly identify the culprit when an application starts acting up. SolarWinds® Hybrid Cloud Observability, with a hybrid approach to AIOps, is designed to deliver the widest observability by:
Requiring minimal configuration and threshold-setting – The solution is built to use machine learning models to learn your information and surroundings automatically. It can use anomaly detection methods to alert you when something goes wrong by considering not only individual metrics but also a holistic view of your infrastructure and the potential effect of any given problem to help reduce the likelihood of false positives.
Maintaining the user experience – Hybrid Cloud Observability can help you avoid significant disruptions by identifying bugs ahead of time. Problems are built to be reported instantly, so you can address them before they impact end users. Hybrid Cloud Observability allows for quick triage, problem-solving, and effective communication with stakeholders impacted by reliability issues. In addition to reducing the mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) and mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR), Hybrid Cloud Observability can help organizations link the performance of its applications to its operational results by isolating and addressing mistakes before they negatively affect end-user experience.
Automatically identifying critical and essential resources, dependencies, and invariants – Hybrid Cloud Observability does not require you to map out what needs to be monitored and how, so you can quickly obtain broad observability insights.
Hybrid Cloud Observability is designed to help you achieve your business goals, which include lower costs, higher productivity, and better customer service.
Get Started with Observability
SolarWinds provides solutions for leading organizations adopting observability with full-stack visibility, prebuilt analytics, and automation to monitor, assess, and manage multi-cloud applications and infrastructure environments. Both our SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability and our software as a service (SaaS) SolarWinds Observability solution are built to offer organizations observability whether their environments are on premises, hybrid cloud, or in the cloud.
If you're not currently a SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability customer but are interested in seeing how observability can benefit your organization's digital transformation journey,
sign up to start a free trial of Hybrid Cloud Observability today.
