As consumer demand for applications and digital services continues to soar, businesses in all sectors are rapidly expanding their digital footprints to deliver the great digital experiences that customers value so highly. But as a result, organizations find themselves managing increasingly sprawling and fragmented IT environments, and technologists are struggling to cope with heightened levels of complexity across their IT estate.

The adoption of cloud native technologies is allowing organizations to scale their applications at speed and deliver game-changing innovation. But it’s currently extremely difficult for IT teams to monitor and optimize availability and performance in these dynamic environments and to ensure faultless digital experiences for customers and employees.

Spiralling IT complexity has exposed the shortcomings of the siloes which have traditionally existed in many IT departments. Disparate teams, data and processes are simply unable to solve problems fast enough in dynamic cloud native IT environments, where everything is constantly changing and application performance is dependent on a vast web of inter-dependent technologies.

AppDynamics Cloud from Cisco AppDynamics provides IT teams with full and unified visibility across distributed and dynamic cloud native applications at scale and allows them to monitor the health of key business transactions in real-time. Technologists are able to quickly pinpoint the source of a problem and analyze its business impact, reducing the time spent on troubleshooting and enabling technologists to prioritize the issues that matter most.

“With cloud native observability with business context, technologists know which problems to target and fix first,” says Gregg Ostrowski, Executive CTO, Cisco AppDynamics. “The objective switches from simply keeping the lights on to optimizing IT performance to drive business outcomes.”

Ending the siloed approach to problem solving

Traditionally, companies executed IT problem solving in a linear fashion, often waiting for a user to raise an issue and then progressing through one team at a time. After a customer issue, the first IT department, such as the network administrators, checked over its suite of processes with the goal of clearing its own team of the problem. The team then passed the request on to another department, such as application maintenance.

It could take several days to pinpoint the source of the problem this way, during which time customers could walk away en masse and revenue would be lost. Ostrowski points out the need to speed up the process. “The adoption of cloud native technologies can actually create more siloes in IT departments with the introduction of new teams such as CloudOps, DevOps and SREs. “Businesses need to act quickly to stop this, to align teams around common objectives and move to a collaborative approach.”

Cloud native observability enables IT teams to get real-time visibility of their entire IT estate (whether on-premises or across multiple cloud environments) in one place. This flattens the problem detection surface because every asset is being monitored at the same time. Technologists can pinpoint the source of an issue in a few minutes instead of several days. This expedited approach to problem solving drives digital experience and protects the company’s reputation and bottom line.

“In order to implement cloud native observability well, leaders need to implement new ways for departments to work together,” says Ostrowski. “In particular, you need to unite teams around a single source of truth for all availability and performance data. This requires cultural change, so you have to be able to evolve the problem-solving process to include shared accountability and collaboration among your technologists.”

A recent Cisco AppDynamics survey found that in Canada, 75 per cent of technologists regard a broader skill set as a critical factor in achieving their full-stack observability objectives. This is an essential shift, as the industry typically encouraged each IT professional to specialize in one area of expertise.

Ostrowski explains that in order for IT professionals to manage the complex range of companies’ digital technologies, each individual needs a broader knowledge base so they can collaborate. “Let’s give an example of a project involving an application team and a security team. The application team needs to understand from a security context what makes their application vulnerable so they can fix security weaknesses. The security team also needs to understand how that application’s features affect security.”

“With AppDynamics Cloud, we work to bridge that cross-domain knowledge gap between departments, whether that’s CloudOps, infrastructure teams, DevOps or SREs,” says Ostrowski.

Canadian companies are already focussing on greater observability

The Journey to Observability report from Cisco AppDynamics, based on research amongst 1,200 technologists in 14 countries, including Canada revealed that growing complexity and the ability to simplify high volumes of data were the main drivers motivating organizations to prioritize observability in 2022.

In Canada, 100 per cent of technologists surveyed stated that it’s important for them to be able to directly correlate technology performance across the full IT stack with business outcomes to prioritize actions based on what will have the biggest impact. And encouragingly, 86 per cent claimed that their organization had made progress in improving visibility across its IT stack over the previous 12 months.

Ostrowski concludes, “Cloud native observability is essential for organizations to keep their digital transformation programs on track and to innovate at ever greater speeds. By connecting IT performance to business transactions in real-time, technologists can ensure that they’re prioritizing the right issues and deliver the seamless digital experiences that keep customers happy and drive revenue. It also allows leaders to validate their investments; they can see in black and white how innovation is impacting business metrics and make strategic, insight-driven decisions.”

This story was created by Content Works, Postmedia’ commercial content division, on behalf of Cisco AppDynamics.