TECH TALK: SPLUNK
Seize the observability opportunity
New research reveals how observability helps organisations respond faster and smarter to performance problems and security threats
Launching new apps. Onboarding new cloud services. Implementing new security patches. The scale and speed of IT is evolving – and that means performance management needs to change too.
Traditional IT monitoring tools and processes are largely reactive, spotting only known problems due to their use of polling and sampling approaches. But in today’s complex world of containers, microservices and zero-day attacks, there are a lot of unknown problems. And if they are not found and fixed fast, the business impact can be significant. For example, nearly half of organisations experienced a decrease in revenue and customer satisfaction after internally developed apps were impacted by service issues1.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Observability is already helping organisations stay one step ahead of service issues, software bugs, and security vulnerabilities. Eight out of ten organisations have improved problem detection and resolution times as well as application security, according to Splunk’s The State of Observability 2023 report.
“Observability is changing how organisations monitor and manage IT systems and user experiences,” said Ian Thompson, an Observability Specialist at Splunk. “With the right tools and processes, observability can pave the way for not only better performance but also higher revenues and happier customers.”
of organisations have encountered tools positioned misleadingly as observability solutions
Organisations that have employed specialists who work exclusively on observability projects:
A unified approach to monitoring
With the potential to enhance IT operations and business outcomes, it’s not surprising that observability has become a big investment priority: 81% of organisations say they have recently increased the number of tools and capabilities they use.
IT leaders are not only deploying more observability solutions but also starting to unify monitoring functions. According to the Splunk research, nearly 75% of respondents expect their tools and teams to eventually unite under one observability umbrella.
Progress toward this end goal, however, is still mixed, with only a quarter of organisations reporting that they have already converged security, application, digital experience, network performance and/or infrastructure monitoring. Despite the slow start, 80% of organisations say observability has already helped to improve alignment between IT operations, developers and security teams.
Lower risk with greater context
Observability and security monitoring are the most common disciplines to formally merge, with around 50% of organisations citing faster detection and resolution of security issues as key drivers.
“Observability enables smarter correlation and remediation of incidents,” said Adrian Kayode Yesufu, an Observability Specialist at Computacenter. “Instead of just responding to current events, organisations can also pre-empt future threats by understanding what is likely to happen.”
And observability leaders are already starting to see a difference: they say bringing together aspects of observability security monitoring tools and teams has had ‘significant positive impact’ on risk management and incident response.
Context is everything when it comes to responding to security incidents and performance issues. An effective observability solution will help teams understand how performance has shifted over time and how this relates to other changes and interdependencies.
For example, a new release could inadvertently introduce a security threat to an ERP system or a cyberattack could result in an outage on a critical customer app. With observability, teams can identify, correlate and resolve performance problems before they impact an organisation’s revenue and reputation.
Performance data alone is not meaningful; organisations need to be able to aggregate it, analyse it and respond to it.
Ian Thompson
Solutions Specialist, Splunk
Better performance, greater resilience
With IT assets and business services constantly evolving, observability solutions need to be extensible and interoperable. The research revealed that 86% of organisations believe it’s important to have flexible observability solutions that cover hybrid architectures.
“Observability solutions must work across the full stack,” said Yesufu. “Open standards make it easier for organisations to capture and correlate traces, metrics and logs from multiple different sources.”
Although 73% of organisations have been using observability tools for more than a year, many are still at the early stages of their journey. But developing a mature practice is worth the effort. For example, observability leaders are 4x more likely to resolve issues in minutes.
“It’s not just about adopting the right solutions and standards,” said Thompson. “Organisations also need to have the right skills, analytics, alerts and processes in place to realise maximum value.”
Greater observability results in both better performance and stronger resilience, which is vital for coping with change. Organisations with a mature observability practice are 10x more likely to have a holistic resilience strategy compared with those just starting their journey.
“Teams and their leaders have to be able to respond quickly and effectively to the unexpected,” said Thompson. “With observability, organisations are better placed to cope with increased complexity and unpredictability, whilst at the same time delivering constant innovation to their customers”
5 ways to maximise the benefits of observability
1. Establish a dedicated team of specialists to promote the adoption of best practices and open standards, such as OpenTelemetry
2. Converge monitoring tools and functions to reduce complexity and duplication
3. Integrate observability into the software development cycle and application design to accelerate go-to-market timelines
4. Conduct post-incident reviews and build feedback loops to encourage continuous improvement
5. Measure observability solutions against key business metrics to maximise ongoing business value