How to Develop an All-Encompassing Observability Strategy
Effective monitoring strategies account for the full stack: Infrastructure, networks, systems, end user experiences, and more. Get more observability strategy tips here, and learn how IBM Instana Observability can help.
Observability—or collecting, identifying, and visualizing information from various applications and systems to optimize performance—has become increasingly important as applications and services become more complex.
To effectively identify challenges and create proactive plans, IT organizations must understand what is happening within their complex IT landscapes. This begins by developing an all-encompassing observability strategy.
What to Consider in an Observability Strategy
Developing an observability plan can seem daunting, but there is a clear path forward. Here are some key factors to consider in your strategy:
- Account for the full stack. Too often, organizations focus solely on infrastructure , leaving them with a lack of understanding of what is happening with end users, and their experiences with applications and services. A complete observability strategy should account for the full stack—from infrastructure, to code, to the end user experience.
- Set key business outcomes. It is crucial to identify and document key business goals as you craft a strategy. What outcomes are you hoping to achieve with observability? What are the technical steps necessary to get there? Who needs to be involved? The more business outcomes you clearly define from the beginning, the more likely you are to meet those goals.
- Identify, integrate, and operationalize key observability tools. Identifying key tools that can help your organization reach its goals is another key part of developing an observability approach. However, you must plan ahead to fully integrate and operationalize these tools by asking the following questions:
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- How do the tools fit into existing processes?
- What capabilities do they provide and open up?
- In what ways will they help you navigate existing challenges and achieve target business outcomes?
- How do they fit into your organization’s culture?
Without integration and operationalization, tools are not as effective as they can be.
IBM Instana Observability
An effective tool to consider in your observability and monitoring strategy is IBM Instana Observability—an innovative application performance monitoring solution to help track performance and quickly resolve incidents.
Instana provides useful, application-based information across different teams within an organization to help close cross-silo gaps. You can use this cross-departmental information, and put common processes around it. In other words, Instana effectively monitors modern applications across a diverse set of teams and IT environments.
Instana can also visualize dependencies between different application components, allowing you to clearly map them out and understand how they work. Better still, installation is quick and simple. Other key benefits include:
- APM monitoring: Monitor any application, service or request with Instana for application performance monitoring
- CI/CD pipeline acceleration: Understand the impact of code-level changes within seconds of deployment to maintain high performance
- Distributed tracing: Trace every request across every service
- Root-cause analysis: Get immediate root cause identification of every service impact and improve response time
Get Started Today
Evolving Solutions is poised to meet you wherever you are on your observability journey with the right tools and guidance to help you deliver actionable insights and better business outcomes. Contact us to learn more about IBM Instana Observability, and how we can help you craft an effective observability plan or start a free 14-day trial, click here.
