Monitoring has long been a staple of the IT toolset. But as IT leaders become more focused on delivering measurable business value, the limitations of simple monitoring are becoming more apparent. Traditional monitoring is reactive by nature and misses the nuances that can provide proactive indications that the environment is headed toward a problem. Alerts from one system don’t always indicate a root cause lurking in another system, oftentimes leading to a Whack-A-Mole approach where a fix to one system causes issues in another.
This can lead to an environment where teams focus more on mean time to innocence, where teams work to absolve their domain as the source of an issue, rather than a quick mean time to recovery (MTTR).
The reality is simple: You can’t fix what you don’t see. And you certainly can’t improve it.
Observability takes simple monitoring to a new level where issues are triangulated among systems to show the true chain of cause and effect throughout an IT stack. Done right, observability can surface leading indicators of risk, letting IT teams proactively address issues before they threaten to impact the business.
Observability helps you see the big picture, understand what’s really going on across your systems, and get ahead of potential problems to ensure IT continues to deliver its intended business value.
Unified observability helps IT teams reduce risk, make smarter decisions faster, and helps the business stay competitive. A highly mature observability program can even be a competitive advantage.
Observability goes beyond toolsets and encompasses a new way of thinking about how to integrate and use the monitoring tools you likely already have. The shift is more about strategy and less about tools and technologies.
Observability is the process of gathering, aggregating, normalizing, and presenting data from across your IT monitoring tools to create comprehensive visibility across systems — including data from APM tools, logs, traces, EDR, SIEMs, and more — to make sense of it. Observability gives you the power to see across domains, functions, and systems. Observability is the process. Visibility is the outcome and is what you get when observability is done well. It’s the ability to take a deeper look into your stack and understand what’s happening in a meaningful way, whether you’re in infrastructure, security, application development, or operations. In this way, observability is a new way of collaborating across silos and creates a common source of truth for all IT stakeholders.
Without comprehensive observability, teams will continue to invest valuable time in reacting to problems inside their silos, dashboards, and their versions of innocence.
Operating without observability is a missed opportunity. You can’t see the signals that tell you a problem is coming. You can’t automate a response. You can’t innovate. You’re stuck spending resources just to keep the lights on. In today’s business environment, keeping the lights on isn’t enough because the competition is making progress where you aren’t.
From a security perspective, the risk is even greater. If you’re relying solely on signature-based detection, you may be blind to real threats and miss the ability to identify anomalous behavior across multiple vectors.
Observability enables teams to identify potential risks to the business, including things like system stability or data loss. It provides factual insights to help IT leaders make more informed, data-driven decisions, helps IT teams pivot from reactive to proactive, and ensures that IT delivers its intended value. It allows you to correlate symptoms with root causes, taking the guesswork out of troubleshooting.
Observability starts with the data you’re already generating then centralizing and normalizing it for analysis, which leads to a unified view of your environment. With enough data, you can get better context for what’s happening and gain the ability to spot leading indicators of risk. This gives you time to act before an issue begins to impact the business. The ability to personalize insights for each stakeholder is what makes observability valuable for the entire organization.
The ability to draw from a single source of truth about IT operations means you can deliver consistent insights for each role. That’s important because observability data needs to be presented in a way that’s easily consumable by key IT stakeholders, each of whom needs specific insights about specific things. For example:
This unified, role-aware approach enables:
Observability should be treated as a strategic initiative, not a one-off project. Like zero trust, it requires long-term commitment and executive sponsorship, which is why the stakeholders also need to be involved with crafting an observability strategy. The broader the input, the broader the adoption and the greater the payoff.
Observability helps the business understand how IT is driving business value. It links IT health directly to outcomes like revenue protection, risk reduction, and strategic agility. Quantitative benefits of observability can include:
Qualitative advantages can include:
Success with observability results in your IT organization spending less time reacting and more time delivering value. One of the simplest ways to measure success is to look at two metrics:
These are the blocking-and-tackling benefits every observability initiative should deliver. As your observability practice matures, you can accumulate other measurable benefits, such as:
Whether you’re just beginning your observability journey or trying to scale a mature practice, Evolving Solutions can help clients create an effective observability approach that can drive tangible business benefits. We focus on delivering real business outcomes, not just dashboards.
We meet clients where they are to help them define a strategy, select the right tools, or more fully utilize tools they already have to maximize their existing investments.
We also have the talent to help you choose the right technology for your organization, structure a roadmap, and co-create a solution. With a broad view across clients and industries, we see what works and what doesn’t, which helps you avoid common pitfalls. Contact us today to get started.
Michael Downs is Chief Technology Officer of Evolving Solutions. As chief technology officer, Michael leads our team of experts focused on helping clients solve their most challenging problems. He is constantly evaluating emerging technologies and sharing that information with Evolving Solutions’ technical teams so they can better help clients address their business challenges.
Russ Staiger is a Principal Security Solutions Architect in the Networking & Security Practice at Evolving Solutions. He is adept at providing strategic advisory services across enterprise and commercial environments to enhance security posture and defense architecture. With expertise in PCI-DSS, HIPAA, CMMC, SOC strategy, and advanced threat intelligence, he delivers comprehensive solutions for risk mitigation and incident response.
He specializes in endpoint protection, SIEM integration, network security, and breach recovery. His career includes roles as a cyber threat intelligence lead and various positions focused on network security analysis and APT mitigation, showcasing his extensive background in proactive and responsive security strategies to address complex cybersecurity challenges.
