Organizations seeking digital transformation tend to build complex infrastructures. They update existing applications while adding multi-cloud, virtual, and cloud-native capabilities. Ultimately, IT managers find themselves managing a diverse and complex distributed network, including cloud, systems, applications, and database infrastructure.

To manage this complexity, organizations employ multiple monitoring and management tools. While their goal is to simplify system administration, the use of multiple tools to manage networks and infrastructure often leads to silos.

This piecemeal approach of deploying a variety of tools exacerbates operational blind spots, delays problem resolution, and increases security exposure to threats. This leaves IT professionals unable to keep pace with application modernization and the dynamics of complex infrastructure due to complexity.

This scenario is common among organizations, but it's not inevitable. IT teams can facilitate digital transformation by implementing a cost-effective, integrated, full-stack, end-to-end monitoring service that overcomes complexity and silos.

Solving problems like this requires full-stack observability.

▲Hybrid Cloud Observer Billing (Photo courtesy of SolarWinds)

■ Differences between Observability and Traditional Monitoring

Observability goes beyond traditional monitoring. Traditional monitoring helps IT organizations understand the current state of their infrastructure and applications. This monitoring collects and processes infrastructure and application telemetry data and alerts, indicating which components are running, down, or changed.

Traditional monitoring typically focuses on specific networks, clouds, or infrastructure. Because it tracks applications and infrastructure elements, IT professionals can identify anomalies and investigate problems when they occur.

Furthermore, they rely on metrics-based dashboards to evaluate telemetry data based on manual or basic statistically relevant thresholds. While monitoring tools are crucial, they don't provide cross-domain correlation, service delivery insights, or operational dependencies or predictability. Modern systems operate in complex multi-cloud environments and possess a vast amount of telemetry data, making traditional monitoring insufficient for modern systems.

Meanwhile, observability goes much further. It measures the internal state of a system by examining output, from end-user experiences to server metrics and logs, and provides insight into the application and system as a whole.

However, monitoring is also a crucial element of observability. To utilize observability, you must first collect information through monitoring. Observability uses the insights and metrics gained through monitoring to identify the root cause of problems.

Monitoring aggregates and displays data to determine whether the system is operating as expected. This information is analyzed and compared to expected results and goals. This process allows IT professionals to understand the health of their infrastructure and applications.

This allows for a holistic view of complex environments, helping to avoid silos.

■ Utilizing Observability

IT organizations can use observability to continuously improve performance, availability, and digital experiences in complex, diverse, distributed environments.

Observability enables organizations to quickly identify and resolve anomalies. However, full-stack observability goes beyond facilitating monitoring and troubleshooting, delivering insights, automated analysis, and actionable intelligence through cross-domain data correlation, machine learning (ML), and AIOps. This is achieved across massive real-time and historical metrics, logs, and trace data.

Observability transcends the silos and fragmented approaches associated with monitoring. Furthermore, when observability is unbounded by machine learning and AIOps, it leverages massive amounts of collected data to deliver insights, automated analysis, and actionable intelligence, empowering IT professionals to quickly resolve issues. IT Operations (ITOps), DevOps, and security organizations can deliver consistent, optimized, and predictable business services, driven by continuously improved digital experiences and IT productivity.

As a result, customers and employees benefit from better-functioning systems. This technology can provide comprehensive, integrated, and cost-effective capabilities to organizations of all sizes and industries, with the flexibility to deploy cloud-connected, on-premises, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) deployments.

When embarking on a digital transformation journey, your organization doesn't need to become more complex, especially when updating existing applications and adding numerous new services and features to your stack. Observability is key to reducing complexity.

Observability can provide practical benefits to IT Ops, DevOps, and security organizations by streamlining digital transformation processes and reducing operational dissonance. Organizations can thus proactively address issues and anomalies to achieve optimal IT performance, compliance, and resilience.

In this way, full-stack observability is a solution that helps organizations of all sizes and industries reduce IT complexity while preparing for digital transformation.