Many organizations find themselves held back not by a lack of effort, but by structural and cultural obstacles that go unaddressed. From limited visibility to manual bottlenecks and fragmented workflows, these friction points quietly erode the stability organizations work so hard to build. Let’s take a closer look at the most persistent challenges to operational resilience and the principles and practices that can help overcome them.
Limited Visibility Across Systems
Fragmented monitoring is one of the most common challenges in modern IT operations. According to a SolarWinds customer survey, organizations rely on an average of 11 different monitoring tools, yet more than half report a lack of full visibility across their environments. The evidence is clear: more tools do not equal better visibility. Disconnected data leads to duplicated work, reactive firefighting, and missed warning signs. This gap delays incident response and impairs decision-making. When observability stops at the tool level instead of spanning the service layer, small issues often go unnoticed until they escalate.
What helps: Full-stack observability that unifies telemetry data (logs, metrics, traces) and maps them to services in real time. This makes it easier for teams to correlate signals, identify anomalies, and take action faster. For large organizations, the challenge is not only seeing what’s happening but also understanding what matters. Without contextual visibility, even the most advanced dashboards become noise.
Disjointed Service Management and Observability
Resilience is as much about coordination as it is about insight. When monitoring platforms and service workflows don’t communicate, the result is fragmented response efforts and longer resolution times. Too often, alerts generate noise rather than guidance. Incidents are routed manually, escalations are unclear, and critical context is lost between systems. This disconnect affects not only resolution time but also team morale and efficiency.
What helps: Integrated workflows that connect observability platforms directly with ITSM systems. When an alert can create a pre-populated incident with context and routing logic, teams can act faster and more consistently. More importantly, service teams need visibility into the same signals that observability tools detect. Without shared context, teams operate in isolation, unable to align on urgency or ownership.
Inconsistent Incident Response Practices
Many teams still rely on informal response processes, such as ad hoc playbooks, tribal knowledge, and improvised communication channels. This leads to variability in how incidents are handled and prevents teams from building operational resilience. A lack of defined roles, unclear escalation paths, and absent post-incident analysis keep organizations from improving over time.
What helps: A documented, regularly tested incident response framework that defines ownership, escalation paths, communication practices, and review procedures. These frameworks should evolve with system complexity and team maturity. Establishing this foundation also reduces reliance on specific individuals and helps ensure continuity in fast-moving or distributed environments.
Overdependence on Manual Intervention
Manual processes create bottlenecks. Whether it’s investigating alerts, generating reports, or managing handoffs, the reliance on people to respond to every signal adds unnecessary lag and increases the chance of error. As environments grow in scale and complexity, manual triage simply doesn’t scale.
What helps: Intelligent automation that filters alerts, correlates telemetry, and guides remediation based on historical and real-time data. This enables teams to focus on decision-making, not data gathering. Additionally, automation reduces operational risk by enforcing consistency, especially during high-pressure scenarios where manual missteps can have outsized consequences.
Lack of Post-Incident Learning Culture
Too often, incident resolution marks the end of the process rather than the beginning of learning. Without structured postmortems and a culture that encourages reflection without blame, teams repeat mistakes and fail to capitalize on improvement opportunities.
What helps: Embedding continuous improvement into the response cycle. Make post-incident reviews standard, actionable, and inclusive. Insights should inform documentation, training, and architecture reviews. Leading teams treat post-incident analysis not as a formality but as a strategic investment—one that pays off in faster resolutions, fewer recurrences, and a more resilient team over time.
Operational Complexity From Third-Party Dependencies
Operational environments today are rarely self-contained. Cloud services, managed providers, and third-party integrations introduce dependencies that are often overlooked during planning. When external services falter, teams are left scrambling, without clear insight or control over the underlying issue, creating barriers to operational resilience.
What helps: Mapping third-party dependencies as part of your operational design. Establish SLAs, redundancy strategies, and visibility protocols with external partners to reduce blind spots and response delays. Teams should also include third-party impact scenarios in their incident response testing to identify where handoffs and contingencies may break down.
A recent report from Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) proposes a three-step approach to managing complexity. Read our breakdown here.
