The last 12 months have seen organizations in all sectors making huge strides in their journey to full-stack observability. Faced with rising complexity and soaring customer demand for great digital experiences, technologists have urgently looked to build on their existing monitoring capabilities, particularly within cloud native environments.
At the same time, they’ve brought together disconnected tools to generate unified visibility into availability and performance across their IT environments.
The latest report from AppDynamics, The Journey to Observability, reveals 60 per cent of Canadian organizations have now started their transition to full-stack observability, and a further 35 per cent are planning to do so in the next 12 months. That means a remarkable 95 per cent of organizations will be somewhere along the journey to full-stack observability during 2022.
However, for all of the recent progress and the heightened levels of optimism, the research reveals a contradiction where technologists remain highly nervous about falling behind their competitors on the journey to full-stack observability, and fearful of the implications if they do. In fact, more than half of Canadian technologists (56 per cent) are concerned that their organization is now behind industry peers in implementing observability solutions.
This is an unfortunate situation and something that needs to be addressed before it places pressure on technologists and potentially becomes a barrier to progress. Here’s why they shouldn’t be overly worried about how they are faring against competitors, and why they’re right to be feeling optimistic about their prospects for the year ahead.
The benefits of full-stack observability
Full-stack observability provides technologists with unified, real-time visibility into availability and performance up and down the IT stack for compute, storage, network and public internet, from the customer facing application all the way into the back end. It enables IT teams to quickly and easily identify anomalies, understand dependencies and fix issues before they affect digital experiences for customers and employees. And when this performance data is linked to business metrics, technologists can assess issues and prioritize their actions based on potential impact to the business.
Already, those organizations that have managed to generate greater visibility into their IT environments are reporting a wide range of benefits. These include improved productivity and reduced operational costs in the IT department, with technologists needing to spend less time identifying anomalies and understanding dependencies in order to perform fixes. Technologists also point to better collaboration between IT operations, development and networking teams because they now have a single source of truth for data, rather than working in silos with their own disconnected monitoring tools.
There’s no need to worry about falling behind
Full-stack observability is still a nascent area of technology and it’s understandable organizations are still only getting started on their journey. Encouragingly, the research shows that technologists understand that deployment of full-stack observability is a multi-stage journey that will evolve as IT complexity continues to increase within their organization. And, they know they will need to adopt a sustained and strategic approach to fulfill their ultimate goals.
However, while technologists accept there is still work to be done for their own organizations to achieve genuine full-stack observability, it appears that they aren’t applying the same thinking to their competitors. They’re anxious about slipping behind and fearful of the implications of doing so, whether that’s reduced productivity in the IT department, an inability to innovate and deliver digital transformation, and spiraling complexity as new applications and IT infrastructure are bolted on to the existing technology stack.
The fact is almost all organizations are in the same boat, still at the early stages of their journey to full-stack observability but starting to build some serious momentum. So, technologists shouldn’t be worried about what their rivals are doing at this stage; they just need to continue the great work they’ve done over the last 12 months and focus on meeting and exceeding their goals for this year.
2022 is the year for technologists to succeed
Technologists have established the perfect platform to deliver success. They have clearly defined strategies in place and generated strong backing from business leaders, securing the resources and budget to surge ahead with their 2022 plans. They’ve made some fantastic early gains and built real momentum behind their programs. Technologists have every reason to feel positive about what they can achieve over the next year, and they shouldn’t waste any time worrying about the competition.
Joe Byrne is the Vice President of Technology Strategy and Executive CTO at Cisco AppDynamics.