Why Observability is Essential to Achieving Basic Business Objectives in Asia

With an unclear economic future for consumers and businesses alike in 2023, a technological investment may not be front of mind for organisations looking to spur financial success.

Apac CIOOutlook | Friday, December 16, 2022

As consumers and businesses alike begin 2023 with an uncertain economic outlook, technology investment may not be top of mind for companies seeking to boost financial growth.

FREMONT, CA: With an unclear economic future for consumers and businesses alike in 2023, a technological investment may not be front of mind for organisations looking to spur financial success.

In a recent research report, firms highlighted that the common thinking in a declining economy advocates for cutting spending, even on technology. The economic downturn, however, will alter the setting for technology investments, who predict that spending would rise in certain sectors while falling in others. He projects that global IT spending would be USD 4.6 trillion in 2023, an increase of 5.1 per cent from 2022.

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Studies have shown that when it comes to best-of-breed technology expenditures, observability provides the greatest commercial benefit. One such study is the New Relic 2022 Observability Forecast, which discovered that the main benefit of observability was enhanced operational efficiency, according to nearly half (45.8 per cent) of respondents in ASEAN.

Even though this is the case, IT teams may struggle to convince the C-suite of the value of observability due to the perceived expense of adoption. Three main justifications ought to support any business case.

Increased Developer Productivity

In the Observability Forecast, over a third (34.4 per cent) of respondents from ASEAN stated that they use observability to automate software release cycles, quicken the time to market for new goods or services, and optimise cloud resource utilisation and costs.

Traditional monitoring has long been the purview of operations, but it creates a walled garden between developers and operations, denying developers access to crucial data needed to comprehend how deployed applications are acting.

By establishing a single source of truth and a shared understanding of software environments throughout the software development lifecycle, observability dismantles this walled garden. As software moves through the development process, it gives developers and operators a consistent view of runtime environments.

With observability, developers can have a holistic perspective of the entire tech stack rather than switching between several systems and having a segregated view of each part, which enables them to collaborate with the rest of the organisation.

The term Full Lifecycle Observability, or FLO, appropriately captures this concept. By helping developers find and fix software issues early in the development lifecycle to prevent production incidents, FLO helps developers save precious time.

FLO is at the core of this advantage, according to the Observability Forecast, which found that 42.7 per cent of ASEAN respondents indicated they use observability to assist digital transformation activities to improve and gain a competitive edge.

Uncovering Cost Savings

Many IT expenditures in Asia are slowing down or even shrinking in the current environment. Teams must prioritise tasks that are in line with shifting economic conditions by using data-driven decision-making. Observability can assist businesses in finding significant cost savings when applied proactively.

Using the public cloud as an illustration Because it accounts for a sizable amount of IT expenses, even a little decrease in resource usage can save a lot of money. Observed experiments and simulations can be used to find these opportunities.

One can hypothesise, for instance, that altering the distribution of current cloud resources for a specific environment won't significantly affect the customer experience. This process can be seen in a controlled experiment or simulation, and the results can be analysed to determine whether to accept or reject the hypothesis.

Of course, a high-value target needs to be found before an experiment can be planned. By monitoring the use of cloud resources, observability can assist in locating these objectives. Generally measuring resource utilisation at high percentiles and sorting the results from lowest to highest usage is an easy technique to find underutilised resources. This straightforward phase will list the resources that offer the highest chances to either decrease resource allotments or consolidate resources. Together, these straightforward observability strategies can produce right away opportunities to find cost savings.

Enabling Tool Consolidation

For IT teams, the development of monitoring over the past 20 years has been a double-edged sword. Although these tools have successfully filled holes in legacy tooling's capacity to support a changing technology landscape, few organisations have the motivation required to adapt modern tools to support legacy settings, leading to extensive tool fragmentation.

Teams are feeling overwhelmed by the large ocean of tools they have embraced as a result of this fragmentation, which directly affects their capacity to efficiently monitor, troubleshoot, and debug problems. Results from the Observability Forecast, which showed that, on average, organisations were using seven monitoring technologies, lend credence to these worries.

In ASEAN, half of all respondents claimed to have discovered software and system outages with various monitoring techniques. Additionally, there is considerable functional overlap among each of these instruments, which raises the expense of tooling and maintenance.

Monitoring, a subtype of observability, is essential to helping modern technology teams. These teams can have higher levels of insight and awareness into how both legacy and modern environments are operating, as well as how that performance influences the customer experience, by switching to a single observability platform where monitoring tools are centralised.

Even if the economic crisis comes on quickly, every downturn is followed by a sharp upturn, and businesses need to be prepared. Potentially, the rise will happen just as quickly. Investing in observability now and consolidating tooling during the recession can help businesses seize growth opportunities when the economy picks up.

Customers will shop elsewhere if systems are overwhelmed. Companies that make observability investments now will be prepared to take advantage of possibilities both now and in the future.

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