Written by David Gold, Senior Vice President, Services Go-to-Market, NTT
With the increasing levels of complexity of IT estates, business leaders are discovering that traditional monitoring tools, skills, and processes are no longer adequate to keep track of their network systems and applications. 98% of technologists believe it is key to be able to directly correlate technology performance against business outcomes, across the full IT stack, in order to prioritise actions based on what will have the biggest impact.
Investing in business-critical monitoring tools without getting the insights — and therefore the business value — can risk businesses encountering failure without knowing the reasons behind it. For example, when an application goes down, businesses may not know the cause, the impact, or most importantly, whether another outage can be avoided proactively.
Yet, we see this happening in organisations everywhere around the world. As tech stacks have increasingly become complicated, observability can no longer be an afterthought. It is key that businesses monitor and optimise availability and performance across a more dynamic and fragmented technology landscape, in order to deliver seamless digital experiences and drive innovation.
If you can’t see it, you can’t fix it
Observability provides businesses with unified, real-time visibility into availability and performance up and down the IT stack. It covers computing, storage, networks, and the public internet, from customer-facing applications all the way to the back end.
With this detailed insight, IT operations, development, and networking teams can then quickly and easily identify anomalies, understand the root causes through dependency analysis, and fix issues before they affect users and the business. For example, 75% of IT practitioners face more complexity and wrestle with overwhelming data noise, while 85% are challenged to cut through data volumes to identify the root causes of performance issues. Just one minor problem in the network, infrastructure, security, storage, or web services, can flow into and degrade the application experience, prompting customers to move elsewhere.
Many organisations face the issue of distilling the vast amounts of data that monitoring tools generate. Data becomes meaningless when organisations cannot understand and leverage it. Organisations must be able to interpret and contextualise the data to support their business outcomes and also be able to proactively flag any anomalies.
The solution lies in full-stack observability, which allows organisations to have a detailed view of the health and behaviour of applications, storage, services, networks and more; essentially, a view from your customers’ standpoint.
Addressing business pain points
There is plenty of innovation happening in the fast-evolving multicloud landscape. A clear, data-driven observability strategy can lead your organisation from a hazy picture to a full, clear view of your applications and multicloud environments. This is important because the ability to monitor your entire IT stack is essential to identifying and remediating performance issues before they affect your business. By simplifying, securing and optimising complex multicloud environments, organisations can effectively reduce their risk and costs.
NTT and Cisco’s new 360 Observability platform, powered by Cisco’s full-stack observability suite of tools, provides full-stack observability for insights into business-critical applications, networks and the performance of your infrastructure. By combining Cisco AppDynamics and Thousand Eyes technologies with NTT’s managed services, business leaders can effectively operate business-critical applications that generate revenue or have other major business impacts but do not have the in-house capacity or knowledge to attend to them themselves.
As technologies continue to advance, many businesses are observing a lack of harmonisation between tools, applications and networks. Having the ability to proactively monitor and optimise applications has never been more important to delivering seamless digital experiences and driving innovation.
