It’s no secret that today’s IT pros struggle to maintain visibility into dispersed and interdependent IT environments. A new report from Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) proposes a three-step approach to managing this complexity. Let’s walk through it.
Here’s What IT Teams Are Up Against
From Observability to Operational Resilience: Connecting IT and Business, a report by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), identifies five key trends driving IT complexity.
- Hybrid deployments spread applications across on-premises and cloud infrastructures.
- Applications run on various types of environments like bare-metal servers, virtual machines, containers, and serverless setups.
- Enterprises often mix monolithic applications with microservices and hybrid architectures.
- Third-party integrations through APIs create additional dependencies.
- Continuous delivery models speed up the pace of change.
The outcome is the creation of highly heterogeneous environments characterized by disconnected telemetry data streams. Teams use a range of poorly integrated tools from an assortment of vendors, and the lack of a unified view results in outages and visibility gaps.
Foundation: Contextual Observability
In a recent article, Tool Sprawl and How to Stop It, I wrote: “The stories are diverse, but all lead back to the same issue: a lack of unity. Fragmentation, information overload, and the need to consult multiple sources to find the truth leave teams bewildered and overwhelmed. The complexity of the digital era requires a solution powerful enough to return cohesion to the IT environment.”
Given the layers of complexity at hand, organizations need a centralized view of their environment. A unified approach to observability contextualizes telemetry data streams, enabling IT teams to track their systems effectively in real time. Having mapped the various interdependencies using data on events, metrics, and logs, the observability platform can provide IT teams with relevant insights to quickly translate into action. This information paves the way for AI-driven issue prioritization and, ultimately, for automated resolution.
Integration: Automated IT Service Management
In a fully functional IT ecosystem, observability and ITSM are closely aligned. Full-stack observability platforms can automatically trigger incident tickets containing the information human operators need to remediate an issue. Teams experience lower noise by correlating and de-duplicating alerts, working to address the pervasive issue of alert fatigue. This helps align incident response pipelines with mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) benchmarks, SLA adherence, and other business-relevant metrics. This contextual awareness also instills a proactive AIOps paradigm, where IT teams can address early warnings before they escalate into major outages.
Intelligence: AI-Powered Operations
The past few years have seen a boom in AIOps, and for good reason. In IT management, AI systems can search vast swathes of infrastructure data for early warning signs of severe incidents. In many cases, alerts trigger runbooks that support IT professionals with known best practices for timely remediation. When it comes to improving resilience, this ability to predict and fix issues before they become incidents is critical. The report states:
“GenAI can also provide conversational interfaces that enable stakeholders to use plain-language questions to gain insights from telemetry data. They also provide concisely tailored reports and individualized dashboards that offer instant answers to specific IT Ops, CloudOps, or DevOps team members. This includes optimizing infrastructure for cost and efficiency based on the learnings drawn from the continuous analysis of contextualized telemetry data.”
Over time, AI systems can learn from past incident resolutions to automate remediation workflows and suggest proactive enhancements to system architecture and operations processes. Keep up with Krishna Sai’s AIOps adoption series to learn which approach to AIOps is right for your organization.
The Path to Operational Resilience
Organizations that unify observability, integrate ITSM, and augment with GenAI are not just keeping their heads above water; they are crafting a robust framework that fortifies them against disruptions. With IT environments becoming more complex every day, this strategy isn’t just smart—it’s essential. Read the full report for more.
