Across the region, we are seeing IT teams make the shift from traditional application monitoring approaches to application observability, as technologists look for new ways to cut through the soaring levels of complexity they’re encountering across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
This is validated by recent research from Cisco AppDynamics, The Age of Application Observability — 91 percent of surveyed UAE technologists agree that observability is a strategic priority. And encouragingly, 64 percent claim that their organisation is already analysing application observability solutions, and 35 percent report that they will do so in the next 12 months.Â
If we look across just about every sector, IT teams are embracing application observability as a way to deliver ever faster speeds of innovation, while also maintaining seamless digital experiences for customers and employees.
Specifically, technologists point to five major advantages of application observability over traditional application monitoring:
Ability to correlate IT performance to business outcomes
Technologists are coming under tremendous pressure to validate the impact of investments in cloud technologies and digital transformation, yet 89 percent of technologists across the Emirates admit that they struggle to align cloud costs with business performance. This pressure is only going to intensify as organisations look to streamline costs and budgets come under closer scrutiny given the macro-economic climate.
Application observability enables IT leaders to generate business transaction insights in real-time, and then to view them in business-level dashboards. This gives them the ability to measure and demonstrate the value that their innovation programs are generating. Application observability allows technologists to make insight-driven decisions on how to prioritise investments based on potential impact to customers and the business.
Ability to detect and fix the root cause of issues
Given the accelerated adoption of cloud native technologies, technologists are having to manage microservices and containers that spawn a massive volume of metrics, events, logs and traces (MELT) data every second.
80 percent of UAE technologists report that this increased volume of data is making manual monitoring impossible. Traditional application monitoring tools can’t handle this level of data, meaning that technologists can’t detect issues and pinpoint root causes in a timely manner.
Application observability allows IT teams to properly understand how their applications are performing in real-time, enabling them to cut through data noise and prioritise those issues which could do the most damage to end user experience.
Better monitoring and early warnings of anomalous events or unauthorised access
With application components running across a mix of cloud native platforms and on-premises databases, visibility gaps are being exposed and the risk of a security event is rising. 92 percent of UAE technologists report that the shift to hybrid environments is leading to an expansion of attack surfaces and heightened vulnerability to cybersecurity threats.
Most importantly, application observability integrates application availability and performance data with security throughout the application lifecycle, leading to more robust products. IT teams can leverage the power of AI and automation to always optimise performance and automatically identify and resolve security vulnerabilities. Automation can be deployed to manage areas such as security response, cost optimisation and workload optimisation, alleviating the burden of complexity and data noise that IT teams are encountering across their hybrid environments. Application observability can be plugged into the CI/CD application development pipeline and provide detailed and accurate log analytics at all times.
The ability to seamlessly monitor across cloud native and on-premises environments
Today’s IT teams are still using different sets of application monitoring tools for cloud native and on-premises technologies, meaning that technologists don’t have a clear line of sight of the entire application path across hybrid environments. This makes effective troubleshooting extremely difficult, impacting metrics such as Mean time To Resolution (MTTR).
If IT teams implement an application observability solution, which has the flexibility to span across both cloud native and on-premises technologies, they can access unified visibility across their hybrid environments. Technologists are able to work with real-time insights into application availability and performance even where application components are running across both cloud native and on-premises technologies.
Improved productivity and efficiency in the IT department
In the absence of the tools and insights required to do their jobs properly, IT teams are facing unyielding levels of pressure. They’re having to scramble to detect and resolve issues, stuck in a never-ending cycle of firefighting. The consequences of this are profound — 89 percent of UAE technologists are concerned that persistent silos will lead to IT talent leaving the organisation.
Application observability enables regional technologists to regain control and take a more proactive approach to managing application availability, performance and security. Indeed, 93 percent believe that the shift to application observability will enable them to operate in a more strategic way and focus more time on innovation. With unified visibility across their hybrid application landscapes, IT leaders can break down silos between people, processes and data, and unite and engage all technologists around a shared vision.
The bottom line is that application observability equips IT teams with the real-time insights they need to ensure that their applications are performing at an optimal level at all times. With digital experience firmly established as the key battleground for commercial success, UAE technologists recognise that application observability is now mission-critical for their organisations.
