If 2021 was the year when IT organizations became aware of the need for observability, then the coming year should see observability aspirations realized.
A report published by observability platform provider New Relic postulates that there are no less than 11 factors converging in a way that will make observability an absolute requirement for organizations.
At the top of that list is a simple fact: Observability is now required to drive digital business transformation initiatives that typically span multiple processes. In fact, a global survey of 1,300 IT leaders, software engineers and developers conducted by New Relic found 90% of respondents view observability as critical to the business.
Second, as a result, observability is now starting to be applied in both pre- and post-production environments as organizations take a more holistic approach to managing the software development life cycle, the report noted.
Third, the report suggested that IT teams are looking to make better-informed decisions based more on facts than intuition. To do this, teams are using data collected from across the enterprise application environment. In fact, the fourth factor advancing observability in the enterprise is that the cost of instrumenting application environments is dropping, which the report notes is making it easier to collect relevant data.
The fifth and sixth factors reflect a desire to rationalize the number of monitoring tools that IT teams currently use and the fact that usage-based pricing has simultaneously made it less expensive to leverage observability platforms as needed.
The seventh factor is the overall shift toward open source software that enables observability platform providers to collectively leverage innovations faster. The eighth factor, closely linked to the open source trend, is the rise of more complex open source platforms such as Kubernetes that require much higher visibility to successfully deploy and manage.
The ninth trend identified in the report is increased adoption of DevOps best practices that encourage IT teams to view observability as a core tenet of any IT management strategy. The tenth factor cited by the report is the need to drive increased collaboration among IT professionals.
Finally, the eleventh factor driving further adoption of observability is the need for increased application reliability as more organizations appreciate their dependence on software to deliver essential services.
Buddy Brewer, a group vice president and general manager for New Relic, said now that observability platforms are becoming more accessible, the next big challenge will be teaching IT professionals what questions to ask as they troubleshoot both legacy monolithic applications and a wide range of emerging microservices-based applications. The results of those queries then need to be easily shared with both developers and internal IT operations teams that must work together to maximize application performance and availability, he added. The latter requirement is why New Relic decided to acquire CodeStream to make telemetry data available with integrated development environments (IDEs), noted Brewer.
There is, of course, no shortage of observability platforms for IT teams to adopt. In fact, the biggest challenge now is getting every application stakeholder to agree to standardize on an observability platform—no small feat, as many DevOps teams may already have a preference for one approach over another.