5 considerations when deciding on an enterprise-wide observability strategy

As enterprises embrace more distributed, multicloud, and applications-led environments, DevOps teams face growing operational, technological, and regulatory complexity, along with rising cyberthreats and increasingly demanding stakeholders. Meanwhile, cost reduction programs affect budgets, constrain technology investment, and inhibit innovation. While 77% of SME IT admins want a single tool to do their job, organizations continue to impose a wide range of tools on them.

Retaining multiple tools generates huge volumes of alerts for analysis and action, slowing down the remediation and risk mitigation processes. On top of this, organizations are often unable to accurately identify root causes across their dispersed and disjointed infrastructure. It’s an issue that shows no sign of going away, with 88% of organizations saying the complexity of their technology stack has increased in the past 12 months, and 51% saying it will continue to increase.

In such a fragmented landscape, having clear, real-time insights into granular data for every system is crucial. For this reason, end-to-end observability that offers a holistic understanding of problems and their impact on application performance is rising in prevalence across organizations of all sizes and industries. But first, there are five things to consider before settling on a unified observability strategy.

1. What is prompting you to change?

Efforts toward business optimization and cloud modernization will almost certainly be met with some resistance from team members and stakeholders who desire the status quo. For this reason, it is imperative to communicate and establish your primary motivations for making such changes across the enterprise and beyond. Selling key stakeholders on moving away from tools they know and are comfortable using can be a challenge, as certain teams will likely have their own fixed ideas about the ideal approach. To obtain organizational buy-in for change, you will need to convince teams that it’s worth changing the way they work to provide better outcomes for the business — and their career.

The most effective way to accomplish this is to tie outcomes to customer experiences. Your observability solution should provide a demonstrable improvement for the customer. If it passes impact assessments and has a compelling ROI, then stakeholders are more likely to support it.

Our recommendation: Consider the outcomes you’re looking to deliver and the outcomes you want to see in your tool consolidation journey. Then, document the specifics of your desired end state.

2. What does your current estate consist of?

Evaluate your tool and platform portfolio against organizational requirements to identify which tools are essential because they affect the user experience or other key business outcomes, and which are no longer relevant. Keep only those tools with unique value that contribute directly to your objectives to eliminate confusion and declutter your toolchain.

Draw up a list of all current tools and the main features your team uses. If you identify duplication, redundancy, or a tool that not everyone uses, such tools are candidates for elimination. Collaborate with your teams to identify any pain points and use that to guide your decision.

Our recommendation: Determine the tools you have, any related contracts, and what each tool is accomplishing for the team using it. This will enable you to accurately assess and trim down your tech stack. Also, take special note of duplicate spend with vendors that have similar capabilities, as this will be a target area for cost savings.

3. What do you want your future estate to look like?

To take advantage of tool consolidation and observability successfully, you first need to have a clear vision of the desired end state of your future estate. Think about mapping dependencies and their capacity to enable advanced causal, predictive, and generative AI for driving advanced levels of automation. AI and machine learning can be used to gain deeper insights into your data, improve business outcomes, and help you pull ahead of the competition.

You also need to focus on the user experience so that future toolchains are efficient, easy to use, and provide meaningful and relevant experiences to all team members. Think also about the role of cloud-native solutions and how your consolidation strategy will incorporate tools that work seamlessly in cloud environments and help your organization modernize.

Don’t forget to incorporate cybersecurity and sustainability measures. Your future estate should be capable of faster threat detection and reduced time to respond to incidents.

Our recommendation: Plan for consolidation, integration, and automation while staying focused on your goals.

4. How do you make this happen?

Modernizing your technology stack will improve efficiency and save the organization money over time. However, a single, unified platform approach is crucial to reap these benefits. This approach streamlines licensing, which means less time handling contract renewals, which finance will appreciate. It refocuses resources on high-value tasks rather than managing legacy tools. The process should include training technical and business users to maximize the value of the platform so they can access, ingest, analyze, and act on the new observability approach.

Our recommendation: Explore solutions, experiment with integrations, and deliver the final tool consolidation product.

5. How do you make your changes stick — and prevent future tool sprawl?

As you seek to consolidate, streamline, and modernize, commit to finding solutions that are easy to integrate and deliver not just data, but clear, actionable answers from that data. The biggest gains will come from enhancing the reliability of your application environments during peak usage and bolstering their resilience to performance degradations, which will improve user experience.

Seek out solutions that leverage real-time analytics to automatically understand how application and infrastructure conditions are changing, where new demand is coming from, and when service-level objectives are not being met. This should help you proactively address issues in real time and eliminate manual, error-prone processes.

Our recommendation: There are always ways to make things better for your team and end users. The right unified solution, training, and reinforcement from leadership will make teams less inclined to adopt single-use tools and fall back into tool sprawl.

Moving forward with a unified observability platform

In summary, centralizing on a single, unified observability platform can help streamline your technical estate, enable operational excellence, and realize strategic benefits by accelerating innovation and developing differentiating services. Getting there, however, involves teams engaging with senior decision-makers and collectively deciding on a single unifying approach.

Eliminating toolchain sprawl, Dynatrace offers a single, comprehensive, real-time view of your entire IT and cloud estate. The Dynatrace unified observability solution enables faster time to value with automated deployment and discovery, greater cost control with no hidden charges or limitations, and higher precision with unified operations supported by multiple AI capabilities.

If you’re interested in learning more about Dynatrace and how you can consolidate your DevSecOps tools and visibility to drive efficiency and enable your teams, get in touch.