Why Companies Should Use Observability for More Than Monitoring

Companies are increasingly tapping into the growing field of observability, often focusing on its monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities to assess and improve the state of their networks. That approach yields significant benefits, but it doesn’t take full advantage of what observability can do. And in today’s highly connected cloud-based environments, companies need more.

With the ongoing spike in cloud, mobile, and edge computing, the rise of hybrid work, and the surge in sophisticated cybersecurity threats, companies need greater visibility into their complex environments. They need advanced analytics across multiple domains, drawing on real-time and historical data and actionable intelligence on a range of issues.

Observability can help organizations meet those needs, which is why IT observability is becoming so sought-after. In the past year, for example, Cisco bought Splunk for $28 billion, and New Relic was taken private in an all-cash $6 billion deal. Those dollar amounts show people realize that they need observability to solve real and complex problems in a hyperconnected world where the flood of data is ever-increasing.

Observability should do more than just monitor networks, devices, and applications for anomalies that affect productivity. It can also be used to resolve three key challenges.

Where Observability and Cybersecurity Meet

As companies adopt zero trust models, they gain greater control over user identities and access privileges, but they lose sight of what their software is doing. Observability can show IT leaders how their software is performing, delivering insight into applications, networking infrastructure and cybersecurity.

Many VPN and security companies are moving to a zero trust model, a trusted environment that calls for continuous verification of network identities but which creates a black box effect because of the tunneling required to move data in cloud settings. IT teams can’t observe what users and applications are doing.

Observability monitors what the user is experiencing via the performance of end-user devices and can show the exact status of the applications. Gaining visibility by measuring outcomes enables teams to preserve the software’s functionality while also backstopping security. Autonomous tools in observability platforms, enhanced by machine learning and AI, can detect anomalous behaviors that can indicate an external attack or an insider threat.

A more secure environment requires more complete visibility, which observability provides with machine learning and AIOps by assessing systems from the user’s perspective. Security is a top priority for any organization, but CIOs need to put observability on equal footing. Prioritizing both is essential for ensuring performance and cybersecurity in complex, distributed cloud environments.

Achieving Sustainability Goals

Sustainability is more than a buzzword in business. Government initiatives to reduce carbon emissions, the emergence of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards, the preferences of consumers, and even other companies have made a sustainable approach a genuine priority for many companies. Recent regulatory changes in California and the EU bring even more pressure to bear on companies to shrink their carbon footprints.

Observability allows organizations to monitor device usage and network power consumption, delivering insights on resources that are consuming more energy than they need to and implementing automated, proactive changes to reduce power use across the enterprise.

An observability platform uses pre-built dashboards to gather fine-grained data on carbon emissions at the device level, and it correlates that telemetry to provide actionable intelligence on reducing energy use. It can, for instance, identify resources that are drawing power when not in use, send users proactive messages about what they can do to lower power consumption, and enable IT teams to make further changes at the organizational level.

Employee Morale

Business leaders believe 68% of their employees would leave a company if their digital needs weren’t met. A positive digital experience on the job is seen as essential, especially by employees in the Generation Z and millennial generations, who are projected to comprise 70% of the workforce by 2030.

Observability helps companies objectively understand the employees' digital experience because it directly measures that experience by monitoring and analyzing end-user devices and outputs. The insights gained from those metrics, combined with analysis assessing how employees feel about the technology they're using, enable organizations to address lingering problems before they fester.

Observability helps companies improve their digital experience, which positively affects retention rates and the ability to attract new talent.

Conclusion

In complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments, AI-powered observability is essential to improving software performance, but it’s also a critical component of addressing other high-priority issues that are vital to an organization’s success, including cybersecurity, sustainability, and the employees’ digital experience. Assessing the state of your network and applications by measuring outputs is the surest way to ensure optimal performance across an entire enterprise.

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