Observability Technology & Tools
Observability and Monitoring Technology Platforms - Open and Vendor Solutions
Most time and focus in enterprise observability is spent on tools, technologies and vendors. With so many well established observability vendors and their powerful marketing and sales machines behind them, the overall spend and wallet capture for these vendors continues to increase year over year as does their importance in the overall technology services mission of an enterprise. Prior to any investment, an organizations needs a well-defined observability strategy aligned with technology architectures and business considerations. Technology services that are targeted for observability also need to be ranked and prioritized by business criticality to ensure investment levels for these systems map to the overall value to the enterprise. All too often, high-impact services are underfunded for observability while lower priority systems are over-invested in.
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Today's observability marketplace is vastly more complex than it was several years ago. With over fifteen major categories of observability tools as well as hybrid tools which occupy several categories - there are hundreds of options for enterprises to choose from a monitoring technology and tools standpoint. Enterprises need to carefully understand their technical and business requirements before evaluating and eventually selecting vendors to address their needs. Analyzing vendor capabilities and their technology qualification stack is critical at this stage.
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Major vendors in this space are continually evolving their product offerings and capabilities - ultimately converging their platforms to address as many customer requirements as possible. Observability vendors have emerged from infrastructure monitoring, to application process monitoring, to cloud analytics, to AI Ops and starting down the path of enterprise analytics across all different data types. Platform vendors may have strengths in certain areas of observability and be relatively immature in other capabilities they may have recently released. Viability of the total platform is needed to ensure that there isn't a disjoint of capabilities or feature overlap which is a common problem. Cost - Benefit analysis of consolidated observability technologies (i.e. platform solutions with several capabilities) versus a "best of breed approach" (i.e. point solutions) should occur on a regular basis or whenever a new observability capability is proposed for introduction within the enterprise.
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Additional complexity in observability technology selection include cloud migration, cloud operations, hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud; digital transformation (or application modernization); data streaming; Open Telemetry and open / vendor neutral back-end data models which are in direct competition with highly proprietary vendor stacks which are designed as "black-boxes" where much of the analysis and machine-learning engines are intentionally hidden from the customer
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Focus on the User, Always . . .
Ultimately, the most important consideration when selecting observability technology are user considerations. The number one contributor in unrealized observability return on investment rests squarely in the fact that enterprises generally have a low number of observability users across the various technology groups including architecture, development, quality assurance, operations, support, capacity management, command center and many, many other user groups. When usage of monitoring technology is concentrated in only a handful of groups, return on investment cannot be realized no matter how expansive the observability program is.
By adopting user adoption strategies including enforcement of monitoring standards in production, enterprises will foster several impactful activities that drive up top and bottom line metrics. This includes the pervasive usage of critical systems monitoring to drive business service lifecycle activities and yielding better decisions. With more users, the total cost of observability is distributed across more stakeholders and thereby reducing the per user cost while at the same time increasing the usage of intelligence-based observability solutions to support decision making.