”In 2021, the average number of cyberattacks and data breaches increased by 15.1% from the previous year, but organizations that had fully deployed AI and automation programs were able to identify and contain a breach 28 days faster than those that didn’t, saving USD 3.05 million in costs.⁴
While CIOs may focus on preventing system problems that cause downtime, Chief Security Officers can use the same observability tools to detect issues that might cause breaches and plug those holes before they allow any data to leak out.” - IBM
What is observability in the context of enterprise IT?
Organizational leaders need access to the right data at the right moment. As technologies and designs grow, sometimes the business need outgrows the technology. Traditional tools may not be as useful in keeping up with the rapid pace of new data feeds generated by vast amounts of microservices.
Orchestration and management systems such as Kubernetes arose to organize and simplify microservice environment deployments. This opened a new area of opportunity in visibility in support of those services.
Observability is a system-oriented approach to IT monitoring that focuses on deriving actionable insights from different types of telemetry data feeds such as metrics, events, logs, and traces. Some have creatively termed this with the acronym MELT. I like melt, however there are more types such as health checks, alerts, and dependencies. Collectively, this is called telemetry data. With added complexity of microservice implementation and the massive amounts of new data feeds they generate, having a way to view and act on information is critical.
How can leaders gain valuable insight into business metrics without tracking?
Observability and tracking go hand-in-hand. Without one, you won’t find the other.
Observability is a critical discipline of building resilient IT systems. It allows teams to gain insights into the internal state of a system based on its outputs and behavior, enabling them to quickly identify and diagnose issues, even in complex and distributed architectures. By leveraging tools and practices, teams can gain a better understanding of their systems' health, performance, and behavior, allowing them to detect potential issues before they become problems.
Proactive vs Reactive
Can you track what you cannot see?
The saying "you can't manage what you can't measure" is often attributed to the late management guru Peter Drucker and I think it fits perfectly here.
One of the key benefits of observability is that it enables IT teams to respond more quickly to incidents. By gaining insights into their systems' behavior, IT teams can identify the root cause of an issue more quickly, allowing them to take proactive measures to prevent further damage. In addition, observability allows IT teams to make better decisions about how to optimize and improve their systems, by providing them with more detailed information about their systems' performance, behavior, and usage.
Just as with next-generation firewalls, there are also companies that specialize in end-end-visibility in a hybrid and multi-cloud environment. Making use of vendors such as Splunk could greatly enhance an organization’s visibility and organizational readiness. (This is not endorsed by Spunk, companies I have worked with currently use their services in conjunction with others.)
Collaboration
Another important aspect of observability is collaboration. Observability promotes collaboration between IT teams, allowing them to share information and work together to solve problems more effectively. This can be particularly useful in complex and distributed architectures, where multiple teams may be responsible for different aspects of the system.
Observability is essential
Overall, observability is an essential component of building resilient IT architectures. It provides IT teams with a holistic view of their systems, enabling them to quickly detect and diagnose issues, respond more effectively to incidents, and make better decisions about how to optimize and improve their systems. By investing in observability tools and practices, organizations can build more resilient and reliable IT systems that are better able to withstand the challenges of today's rapidly changing technology landscape.
”A modern enterprise – one built to respond quickly to both problems and opportunities within hybrid multi-cloud environments – relies on a modern IT infrastructure. The more advanced the system, however, the more complex it becomes and the more difficult to manage. Stakeholders throughout the organization impact, influence and benefit from the systems for which IT is responsible. And the impact of a mere one-second delay means a 7% decrease in customer conversion¹ and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction². That’s why IT organizations are investing so heavily in observability.” - IBM
https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/white-papers/observability-for-modern-application-platforms
Observability for Modern Application Platforms (vmware.com)
https://octo.vmware.com/cloud-observability-framework/
Understanding Observability: A Cloud Observability Framework | Office of the CTO Blog (vmware.com)
https://www.ibm.com/resources/automate/observability
The Enterprise Guide to Observability | IBM
https://www.ibm.com/reports/data-breach
Cost of a data breach 2022 | IBM