What is observability?
Observability is the ability to understand how your tech stack performs by leveraging MELTs (metrics, events, logs, and traces) acquired from various sources within your network environment.
According to Gartner, “observability is the ability to measure and understand the internal states of a system by examining its outputs”.
It is like having a smart assistant so you can go beyond monitoring and alerting and dig deeper into the status of the health of each network device. Observability provides you with a complete picture of your network infrastructure to address how it’s performing. This enables IT admins to correlate why something happened the way it did and possibly take remediation measures or automate fault management in a predictive and proactive manner.
Businesses that have adopted observability as a practice have seen significant improvements in performance, quicker incident detection and troubleshooting, decision making, user-experience, and more benefits. But before we delve into the details of adopting observability, let’s discuss the fundamentals of observability and learn why choosing observability over traditional monitoring can greatly enhance your business operations.
Traditional monitoring vs observability
Imagine a banking firm in its digital journey still practicing traditional monitoring methods. It’s crucial to keep an eye on the performance, health, availability, and security of the digital banking platform at all times.
Let’s see how the current monitoring practice can help the IT admins during a mishap.
Scenario A – When an incident occurs, traditional monitoring methods allow IT admins to collect vital details, usually only after the incident has occurred and the damage is done. IT admins then will try to identify the root cause of the issue without having much insight, and this process often further strains the network. During this time, the end users might experience delays in page loading, page refreshes, hampered e-commerce activities, including being unable to send or receive money, and more. All of this can lead to financial loss and reputational damage.
This is the problem with traditional monitoring; it’s a reactive approach. As the volume of data grows, it’s difficult for any network monitoring tool to keep up with the complexity of a modern network and the variety of data. IT admins often don’t know where a problem occurred and what caused it.
Scenario B – Utilizing an observability tool, when your digital banking platform is threatened, it not only gathers the data but also provides IT admins with holistic insights obtained by analyzing data from various sources which enables a quicker fix. IT admins gain a comprehensive understanding of not just what happened but also why it happened and where it happened.
It’s clear that observability provides a proactive approach that enables a business to achieve a better understanding of the network when an observability tool is utilized. The observable data obtained from the environment itself helps IT admins trace and locate the issue through multiple components and layers, and proactive resolve issues.
Importance of observability in modern environments
Modern IT environments involve distributed architectures, resource allocations, and data integration from various sources, creating a complex landscape. Handling this complexity calls for introducing advanced tools and practices for monitoring, security, and performance optimization, as well as effective strategies for managing data, infrastructure, and end user challenges. This is where AI-powered full-stack observability comes into play. Adopting this practice can help IT admins navigate potential issues by ensuring they gain better insights and control of dynamic IT environments.
Key reasons why AI-powered observability should be a part of complex IT environments
A network environment that is completely observable provides visibility into your technology stack, ensuring that your network infrastructure remains consistently operational. Key reasons why observability is preferred in a complex IT environment include that it:
- Identifies issues in real-time and significantly reduces MTTR
- Monitors crucial SLAs
- Traces and resolves an issue by leveraging root cause analysis
- Monitors and manages configuration changes
- Gains consistent feedback through logs and reports, and utilizes advanced machine learning to forecast potential issues based on historical data
- Forecasts intrusions or locates the errors using threat detection techniques
Unlock the potential of AI-powered full stack observability with OpManager Plus
An AI-powered full-stack observability tool can proactively identify problems, comprehend modifications, and identify solutions. ManageEngine provides a reliable and robust tool, OpManager Plus, that provides IT admins with the ability to handle data in lump sums, monitor performance changes, and learn how the network components are connected internally. This solution delivers a competitive edge over other traditional monitoring tools.
OpManager Plus consolidates data via various network management tools to serve as an all-in-one observability tool equipped with multiple prebuilt features. Utilizing AL and ML technologies as well, this comprehensive software solution monitors networks, controls bandwidth and network settings, plus examines firewall rules, logs, policies, and monitors application performance and usage.
This integrated solution provides:
- Intelligent automation: Monitor performance metric values as they fluctuate, predict values with high accuracy, and automatically establish thresholds by utilizing ML and AI technologies with OpManager Plus.
- Optimized user experience: Establish control over business critical applications and ensure you meet end-user expectations.
- Enhanced security: Monitor network changes and irregularities, pinpoint the source in a jiffy with the holistic insight acquired via multiple sources in your network infrastructure. Thwart malicious attacks and identify security threats almost instantly to help ensure your business network remains operational 24/7.
- Comprehensive protection: Identify and address potential firmware and security vulnerabilities and initiate prompt action to mitigate risks and improve the security of your network devices.
- Enhanced predictive capabilities: Facilitate informed decision-making and improve network efficiency by gaining real-time insights, enabling proactive problem detection, improved resource allocation, capacity planning, predictive analysis, trend forecasting, security enhancement, and more.
- Enhanced visualization: Gain comprehensive insight into network traffic, ensure adherence to security policies, oversee firewall performance, and obtain reports and intuitive dashboards.
The key capabilities of OpManager Plus, an integrated AI-powered observability solution, ensure that the observability tool not only collects data but also makes it actionable, helping IT teams maintain system health and optimize user experience effectively.
If you’re interested in learning more about OpManager Plus, sign up for a personalized demo. Or, test the solution for yourself with a free, 30-day trial.
Author name: Sandhya Saravanan
About the author: Sandhya Saravanan is a product marketer at ManageEngine. She creates user-friendly content that drives awareness around advanced network monitoring, observability, and AIOps. Beyond work, she’s an art enthusiast and volunteers at a non-governmental organization.
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