Why observability will be key for managing IT complexity

It is increasingly becoming a hybrid and multi-cloud world, as more and more organizations in India are looking at putting specific workloads for specific clouds or on-premises environments. A study done by Nutanix last year showed that a massive 84% of enterprises in India prefer a hybrid-cloud model. While the hybrid model is a preferred model, it has its share of challenges. Hybrid cloud environments are often complex, with multiple cloud providers and on-premises systems that need to be monitored and managed. This can make it difficult to get a comprehensive view of systems and identify problems as they occur. Hybrid cloud environments can create data silos, which can make it difficult to access and analyze data from different sources.Ensuring security and proper governance across multiple systems and platforms can also be challenging in a hybrid cloud environment.

To ensure good performance, enterprises need complete visibility into legacy, on-premises infrastructure and cloud-based ecosystems. This is important as an application hosted on the cloud can now be spread over multiple cloud service providers. To address these challenges, many enterprises deploy different and multiple disconnected solutions to monitor availability and performance. However, this is ineffective, as these tools do not provide unified visibility into the complete IT ecosystem – across on-premises and cloud environments. To address these issues, it is important to implement a robust observability strategy that includes the use of tools and techniques such as monitoring, logging, and tracing to provide visibility into the hybrid cloud environment.

How full-stack observability can help

Observability is important for managing IT complexity because it allows enterprises to monitor and understand the behavior of their systems and identify problems as they occur.

Some key benefits include:

Real-time visibility of IT availability and performance: Observability can help enterprises get a comprehensive view of their hybrid or entire multi-cloud infrastructure, including all the different components and services that are running across different cloud providers or on-premises infrastructure.Full-stack or 360 degree observability can go beyond monitoring toprovide real-time and unified visibility of IT availabilityandperformance. This helps in capturing performance metrics and identifying potential red flags up and down the stack, in real time,across the entire stack of compute, storage and network across different service providers. This capability enables the IT teams to quickly identify issues and find out the root cause before it starts impacting end users.

Improved application performance: Observability provides a comprehensive view of applications, which can help enterprises understand how they are functioning and identify any issues or bottlenecks.For example, IT teams can have complete visibility into every application component, their interdependencies and connections across hybrid cloud environments. These insights enable IT teams to resolve issues quickly. By studying application performance data and comparing it to businessoutcomes, IT teams can prioritize and resolve issues based on their potential business impact. Observability tools can provide detailed insights into the root cause of problems, which can help enterprises identify and fix issues more quickly. More importantly, observability tools can help enterprises monitor and enforce compliance with regulatory requirements for their applications.

Improved Security: With observability, enterprises can more easily identify and respond to security incidents that span across multiple cloud environments, which can be difficult to do without the right tools and visibility. By using observability to identify and address potential security issues, enterprises can improve the overall security posture of their hybrid cloud infrastructure and reduce the risk of security breaches.By continuously monitoring applications, observability tools allowenterprises to detect and resolve issues before they impact end users, which can improve the reliability of their systems.

Improved capability to right-size application infrastructure: Observability can help in right-sizing application infrastructure in a hybrid or multi-cloud environment by studying baseline applicationworkloads and their respective resource utilization and user experience. In a multi-cloud environment, observability can provide the necessary insights from the entire application stack and address any possible performance related issues.

Better resource utilization: In a hybrid cloud environment, observability tools can help in optimizing resource utilization by providing visibility into how resources are being used across different environments. With observability tools, enterprises can monitor resource utilization in real-time and identify opportunities to optimize resource allocation.For example, observability can help in identifying workloads that are overloading resources, or underutilized resources that could be used more efficiently. Enterprises can then use this information to adjust the allocation of resources across their hybrid cloud infrastructure to better match the needs of their workloads.By optimizing resource utilization, enterprises can reduce costs, improve efficiency, and ensure that their hybrid cloud infrastructure is operating at peak performance.

In conclusion, observability is a powerful tool for managing and optimizing the performance of business applications and the underlying IT infrastructure. It provides comprehensive visibility into the performance and behavior of systems and enables organizations to identify and fix problems before they become critical.Observability is especially valuable in complex and dynamic environments such as hybrid clouds, where it can help organizations manage and optimize the performance of their infrastructure across multiple environments.

The article has been written by Rishikesh Kamat, Senior Director- Products & Services, NTT Ltd in India