I’ve discussed many technology domains over the years, during interviews with CIOs, CTOs and CDOs. One common trait is their ability to translate the business value of IT.
And, when I think of how organizations across virtually every industry are becoming digital businesses in some way or another, I think about an area that has emerged as foundational to an organization’s success – observability. In today’s world of observability, there are four value drivers that should be well understood as they dictate how efficiently your organization operates and, ultimately, how it impacts your customers.
First, to level set, let’s lay the foundation of what full-stack observability means as a technology domain. Many of the most successful businesses operate as digital businesses in some fashion. This requires infrastructure (on-premises, cloud or multi-cloud) along with applications that are used by the business and/or its customers to make transactions of some kind – from purchasing goods and services or simply to obtain information. The entire technology stack can get very complicated, with the use of microservices, API calls and other third party components required of an application.
When all stitched together, this is what makes up the entire end-to-end transaction of the user journey. And, because of the complexity, oftentimes your infrastructure doesn’t behave the way you want, and the application can get flaky – impacting the user experience. The resulting impacts can be anything from a minor inconvenience to the loss of millions of dollars in revenue if the incident detection and resolution process is not seamless.
This is where full-stack observability platforms like Datadog come into play. IT research firms, Gartner and Forrester, have similar viewpoints regarding the operational and financial benefits of standardizing on a single platform. I will share my insights below into the key business drivers of why many organizations today are looking at full-stack observability platforms to improve their business agility and reduce risk.
“By using a single platform to monitor 80% to 90% of IT services, teams can diagnose [and remediate] problems faster.” – Forrester
Accelerate Digital Transformation
This can fundamentally be summarized as how organizations adjust to market changes quickly by modernizing applications and accelerating digital transformation to grow revenue.
When is it difficult to embark on digital transformation? From a tech stack perspective, it oftentimes is challenged when there is a lack of unified visibility – meaning, teams are siloed, data is siloed, and monitoring tools are siloed. The negative result to siloed tools, for example, is often that no one knows what data other people have in their own company, leading to manual processes to correlate the data, which is slow and cumbersome.
When full-stack observability is deployed, the positives are exponential to efficiency and effectiveness of cross-team collaboration when everyone is working from the same source of truth. Teams can release code more quickly and respond to competition and market changes faster.
Enable Operational Scalability and Cost Reduction
This is probably the most well-known value driver for IT leaders to align to, as there are numerous benefits to siloed tool consolidation onto a single observability platform, such as cost reduction and the ability to rapidly scale, if needed.
It’s almost always true that no one likes troubleshooting as it means something is most likely wrong, and stress is elevated for everyone involved, from the IT department to the business unit leadership. With siloed monitoring tools, troubleshooting historically has taken too long and involves too many people due to the lack of having a single-pane-of-glass view. You’ll hear comments from frustrated team members about having to manually correlate data, which can take from hours up to days for complex environments.
This is where full-stack observability comes into play to streamline the incident detection and resolutions process. When siloed tools are consolidated onto a single observability platform, infrastructure teams can work in tandem with application teams to pinpoint the root cause faster and more accurately. This leads to lower operational costs and lower Mean-time-to-Repair (MTTR) metrics.
Enhance the Customer Experience
Top of mind for most executives is ensuring an excellent customer experience. Why? Because the customer experience determines if your company will increase customers and revenue or lose customers and lose revenue.
Forward thinking companies are designing their observability strategies to prevent impacts to their customers in the form of proactive monitoring and AI in order to avert incidents from happening in the first place. The ability to have insights into potential issues before they occur is the best way to ensure the customer experience is not impacted by the technology. (As an aside, I once spoke with a CIO of a major retailer in Canada and he said, “Brian, if the customer shopping in our store doesn’t think once about the technology that is being used to provide them their shopping experience, then we have done our job correctly.” Interesting perspective.) We often think technology is the be-all and end-all, and that everyone should be impressed with it when, in reality, if we start to think about the technology while trying to make a purchase in-store or online, then that probably means the technology is not working properly.
Reduce Operational, Security and Compliance Risk
Risk: The one topic no one likes to discuss, especially CEOs. At the end of the day, though, many technology decisions have an element of risk mitigation inherent in the discussion. Risk can take many forms, like reducing MTTR, reducing the number of Sev1 incidents, or business metrics such as reducing customer churn.
This is what full-stack observability is uniquely positioned to do – reduce risk, whether that be operational, security, or compliance risk.
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When embarking on the journey to modernize your observability strategy, keep in mind the four main value drivers when working from strategy development through to deployment. At many points in the process, you will be challenged on the project, its significance to the company, etc. When you can explain the business value of full-stack observability, others will follow your lead.