There are so many tools and applications powering the world of business right now, fueled by the adoption of innovative cloud-based technology. But with tech estates becoming increasingly multifaceted, it can be hard to keep on top of performance across the board – lots of tech can, in theory, mean lots of issues if not monitored correctly. That’s why it’s so important to have complete visibility across not just your organisation’s network, but your entire ecosystem, to ensure consistently optimal uptime, productivity and resilience.
Yet traditional monitoring tools simply aren’t cutting it. Delving deeper into this topic, our Senior Account Director, Glenn Ollivant, believes Unified Observability is the answer to IT leaders’ prayers. We chat to him about why Unified Observability is not just another tech buzz term that will silently slip away, but an integral part of any business performance strategy for years to come.
Tell us a little bit about what you are seeing in the business landscape right now
The world of business looks vastly different now compared to a few years ago, in terms of the way we are working, and the tech being used. It is much more complex. Hybrid working posed several challenges, for example, which enterprises had to work through to keep employees productive and customers satisfied. Many consequently embarked on digital transformation journeys to modernise their IT infrastructure.
The days when a business’s IT infrastructure consisted of just email, CRM systems and Microsoft Office, are therefore long gone. Now, firms of all shapes and sizes have found themselves with ecosystems of very varied applications – most of which are SaaS-based. And from private and public cloud networks, to firewalls, cloud security, unified comms solutions, and more, everything needs to perform seamlessly if businesses are to keep up.
But it’s hard to maintain a pair of eyes across everything. Plus – with hybrid working now extremely popular – tech leaders have less physical visibility over their employees from a productivity and technology usage point of view. The monitoring of network and application performance is therefore key.
What are the challenges of traditional monitoring tools?
Traditional network monitoring tools – which often specialise in the analysis of only certain types of tech – are simply not up to the job for such complex business environments. In fact, our partner LogicMonitor found that enterprises are now using up to five or more monitoring tools, to ensure they have all bases covered. But this results in fragmented and siloed information strewn across several different platforms – not to mention the rising costs for five solutions, instead of just one.
There’s also the need for IT teams to keep switching between platforms, which wastes valuable time and it becomes harder to keep these multiple tools up to date which risks uncovering false positives. Out of date tools could flag something which is not an issue, for example, making it difficult to identify the true root cause of an application problem.
This seems ludicrous, given monitoring tools are supposed to help IT teams, not bog them down with extra work.
Lastly, and perhaps the biggest issue of all, is that traditional approaches to monitoring are typically reactive, not proactive. Once an issue has arisen, engineering teams will work to rectify it as quickly as possible, but unless efforts are deployed to determine why something happened, there is a significant risk that the issue will reoccur.
What is Unified Observability? Why should businesses adopt this approach?
Unified Observability – on the other hand – represents the future of network monitoring.
Providing an overall insight into all applications, systems, and devices on your network, it is made up of three pillars which work closely together to give a complete view of your business – digital infrastructure, employee productivity and customer experience.
Much of today’s business is conducted online, through websites or apps. Therefore, if your app is not working then you are not delivering for your customers. This is the only interaction they will have so it is imperative to have visibility into the performance of this business-critical tech.
Employees also need high-performing tools to do their jobs. All communication platforms, CRM systems, product dashboards and more, need to be available and performing well to drive the company forward.
Underpinning all of this is an organisation’s digital infrastructure. As I said before, this has changed significantly over the last few years as cloud adoption has accelerated. IT teams therefore have a huge amount of pressure to ensure uptime, resilience and availability, and they must move quickly to remedy any identified issues. Better still, they ideally need to take steps to pre-empt such issues before they even arise.
These three pillars must work together to achieve Unified Observability, and truly fit for purpose application monitoring will deliver this outcome. Businesses need to see more and know more to do more.
How can businesses adopt this approach?
Organisations do not need several monitoring tools anymore. In fact, this will only hold IT teams back. What you need is one platform to proactively monitor all infrastructure – everything in one dashboard which saves your teams time, and therefore reduces costs.
A platform like LogicMonitor – which powers Vapour’s AMaaS solution – will automatically learn and adjust to your environment, reducing ‘noise’ and false positives so your teams can gain important, real-time insight into the root-cause of problems – even before they start to cause any security, speed, productivity, resilience, or experience challenges.
An approach centred around Unified Observability enables firms to move forward in the digital era with a complete view of their business-critical applications, and how all are performing.
To discover more about the power of modern application monitoring technology, catch up on a recent webinar, delivered by Vapour and LogicMonitor.
