We are seeing a significant shift in the market away from the traditional “black box” model of outsourced technology support involving extended contracts and enterprises with little or no insight into their infrastructures. Instead, enterprises seek to regain control of their systems for faster issue diagnosis and improved insights into their IT estate. The aim is to create elasticity and resilience to meet dynamic business objectives through greater observability. To achieve this, enterprises are advised to evaluate their observability maturity level to make sure they are making the right choices going forward.
The “black box” model is proving too rigid, inefficient, and slow for today’s increasingly complex and fragmented enterprise technology landscape and is no longer fit for business purposes. While some IT support contracts include observability, enterprises still have far less control over their processes and data within the observability tool landscape and operational models. This can make it difficult for enterprises to fully understand their infrastructure performance and interdependencies when preparing for and making changes rapidly.
Enterprises can lose direct access to raw telemetry data, for example, which can limit their ability to analyze issues independently. Relying on third-party vendors’ dashboards may not provide the full context or ability to query and correlate data as if they had control over the agnostic and converged observability stack.
Enterprises need to cope with acceleration technology innovation
There has been a shift in the market paradigm. Previously, the focus was on investing in technologies to be utilized for a certain number of years, using service providers to deploy them. Now, IT layers must be business-relevant, which brings modularity and composability into play. Enterprises must consolidate what they have or build an IT Service Management (ITSM) hub combining ITSM tools and AIOps.
Many enterprises are opting to implement a service integration and management (SIAM) layer to improve business agility and visibility into the inner workings of their infrastructures. This layer allows for more modular, flexible, and composable technology and service management. This shift makes IT services more flexible and adaptable, better supporting evolving business needs.
This integration layer enables enterprises to regain control over critical monitoring and service management functions. Acting as a central hub, it allows enterprises to manage tasks using their chosen mix of internal and external tools, in-house teams, service providers, and integrators.
To achieve this, data sets are drawn from internal and external tools, including infrastructure metrics, application performance, configuration, and network performance data. These are fed into a diagnostic data platform, usually Service Now. This allows for the implementation of smart alerting, for example, to prioritize incidents, enabling faster and more effective responses. It also provides management insights and enables future AI-based use cases.
The primary goal is to build a single platform and include a unified data layer that can aggregate data from various sources. This holistic visibility enables enterprises to understand their IT estate, identifying issues faster and more accurately. By integrating observability data into a single platform, enterprises can implement intelligent alerting mechanisms that prioritize incidents based on business impact, enabling faster and more effective responses, for example.
After all, observability isn’t just about visibility, it is about creating and overseeing a unified structure that ensures these systems work seamlessly together in a composable, agnostic, and future-proof manner. Observability is one pillar, and the right operational model is the other. The most efficient models of operational efficiency combine consolidated and unified, cross domain visibility coupled with a suitable SIAM operational model to act based on the visibility.
Breaking technology silos
A single converged data infrastructure that supports the composability of technology services is pivotal to observability’s success. It enables enterprises to more easily assemble, disassemble, and reconfigure technology services such as databases, business intelligence tools, APIs, and composable microservices for flexible application architectures via data-driven insights.
The objective is to create a flexible, composable set of services across different technologies, ensuring they work together seamlessly and efficiently to support business strategy.
However, this approach brings its challenges regarding data flow management, visibility gaps, and scaling, for example. Establishing a robust, agnostic, fully controllable data platform is a vital foundation for observability. It provides the interoperability, standardized interfaces, and modular architecture necessary for a comprehensive view of the IT estate.
Another critical factor to success is cross-functional alignment, which helps break down data silos between teams like networking, security, and cloud. The challenge arises when teams use different tools to collect and analyze data, often leading to conflicting conclusions and confusion.
Addressing these challenges hinges on creating the unified data layer outlined and ensuring that people, processes, and technology work together, underscoring the observability methodology’s holistic approach to improving system performance and reliability.
There is no one-size-fits-all answer
A SIAM framework, visibility, and observability all play crucial roles in creating a structure for managing IT services in multivendor environments, allowing enterprises to effectively manage their services and ensure optimal performance across an increasingly diverse and fragmented IT and skills landscape. Working together, they enhance service delivery, improve incident response, and adopt a data-driven approach to IT management, ultimately leading to more impactful and faster business outcomes.
Observability alone comes in many flavors, and there is now the right road to take in the journey to observational maturity. Some enterprises, for example, are satisfied using a single service provider’s native tool within SD-WAN that monitors and manages network performance on specialized platforms like Splunk for observability, mainly if they use these tools for service integration and management (SIAM).
Larger and more complex enterprises often integrate observability with IT Service Management (ITSM) platforms like ServiceNow, which offers various capabilities to support SIAM practices. These include multivendor integration, reporting and analytics across vendors, and the tracking and management of incidents across multiple providers. They must decide whether to continue investing in and consolidating their current tools or to build an ITSM stack that could consolidate and integrate platforms like the combination of several native tech tools like ServiceNow and Splunk.
Do you know where you sit on the observability maturity scale?
The maturity of an organization’s technology landscape and service management impacts its ability to adopt and leverage observability. More mature enterprises are the ones that can connect fragmented processes and technology to turn observability data into valuable insights. They are better equipped with the processes, technology, skills, and culture to turn observability data into actionable insights, automate responses, and continuously optimize their infrastructure. As all enterprises’ needs, challenges, and complexities are different, there is “no one size fits all.”
An observability maturity assessment is advisable to help an enterprise determine its maturity level and is invaluable in providing guidelines and a framework for navigating this complete and continuous journey toward enhanced business outcomes.
An assessment typically maps existing toolsets with business drivers of different customer personas. It aims to align specific tools with business challenges, opportunities, and strategies regarding data convergence, observability, and orchestration.
This comprehensive overview aims to allow enterprises to draw up a roadmap for observability by analyzing current capabilities and identifying gaps and areas for improvement. It pinpoints the right observability tools and processes for optimum performance while outlining an integration layer to put less pressure on the service provider layer for technology support. The result is a more elastic and resilient business moving forward.
Observability is no longer a nice to have – it is essential to read modern complex IT
Underperforming infrastructures limit any business's effectiveness. An observability maturity assessment should be top of the agenda for any enterprise seeking to improve its ability to understand, analyze, and respond to the behavior of complex systems and gain a competitive edge by turning data into actionable insights.
Orange Business utilizes its extensive expertise to help customers assess their maturity levels and enhance performance management by better understanding their technology, people, and processes. Contact us to learn how we can help you conduct an observability maturity assessment to provide clear visibility, valuable insights, and faster resolutions.
Antoine is a Consulting Lead for Europe. Antoine has over 13 years of experience in ICT business development, technical consulting, and business advisory at Orange in Singapore, the UK, and Switzerland. On weekends you can find him hiking, climbing, diving, or playing the piano.