Presented by Cisco AppDynamics

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For 78% of consumers, the digital experience a company provides is equally important as the actual product or deals offered. And 64% say that brands have one shot to impress them during the holiday shopping season, and if their digital service or application does not perform well, they won’t use it again. The recent Cisco AppDynamics research that surfaced these findings also showed that no matter the vertical, once you lose a customer’s trust, it’s near-impossible to win it back. And on the business side, the feeling is the same. As soon as a partner feels like a product or service failed to live up to its promised standards, they’re very quick to do a re-analysis of the relationship.

“The interesting thing is that the complexity of technology driving the user experience doesn’t matter, or whether it’s in-house or a third party,” says Gregg Ostrowski, CTO Advisor at Cisco AppDynamics. “Disappointed consumers go right after the brand, because they view it as a brand issue.”

Organizations are rapidly transitioning to cloud native solutions and reaping tremendous benefits, but these benefits aren’t translating to digital experiences. IT leaders tasked with delivering seamless application experiences are still hampered by the lack of full visibility and correlated insights across cloud native environments. Plus, they don’t have the tools they need to identify and prevent or repair a behind-the-scenes problem before it becomes a customer issue. Between these roadblocks, unearthing the root causes of user experience issues can take countless cycles, and it’s impossible to tell whether an issue might pose a threat to the business.

That’s why it’s critical that businesses turn to the dynamic monitoring offered by cloud native observability. It gives IT teams a seamless, unified view of their entire technology stack and intelligent insights into availability and performance, in the moment and over the long term. And as IT leaders plan for 2023 and beyond, it’s increasingly crucial to fold cloud native observability into the larger IT roadmap, too.

“Observability and correlated insights across cloud native environments help IT leaders thoroughly understand how issues impact business-critical applications and the bottom line,” Ostrowski explains. “It also means they no longer have to spend countless cycles searching for root causes to quickly identify what is degrading the user experience.”

Eliminating cloud monitoring challenges

The struggle for ITOps teams comes from having to piece together massive amounts of data from a multitude of siloed, domain-specific tools, across a highly distributed and complex environment. Making sense of the whole picture is a complicated, unwieldy task, and monitoring system health is considerably fraught. Delivering dependable digital experiences for end-user customers is a struggle without correlated insights into the way critical issues impact business outcomes.

“In the face of all these challenges, it’s clear that the monitoring approach has to change,” Ostrowski says. “A cloud native observability solution brings together all the different teams within the application stack, so you not only quickly pinpoint problems, you gain business insights as you continuously ingest data.”

More companies are embracing open standards, which offer greater observability and a more complete view of app performance by standardizing how telemetry data is collected and sent to the backend. Cloud native observability unlocks the ability to not only collect each of the four telemetry data types, Metrics, Events, Logs and Traces (MELT), across multiple deployments, but also correlate it.

Individually these data types offer critical insights into application performance: metrics report what’s going wrong, while events and traces show where the issues are starting, and logs help uncover the root cause. But together, they accelerate the identification of root causes, slashing the time it takes to detect and resolve application issues in the cloud.

“Ingesting that data into a centralized platform gives all teams complete visibility into the application and the very dynamic nature of the containers,” Ostrowski explains. “But the critical advantage is that business level insight is brought into the back end, in a way that gives the application developers the speed and scale necessary to help correlate and align tech goals to the business objectives they’re targeting, optimizing for user experiences and business outcomes.”

Modernized architecture, which often breaks up a single application into 10 or 15 different entities, means a cloud native observability solution is inundated with a flood of data — and that means we’ve surpassed the point where it can be handled manually, and that’s a good thing. Cloud native observability solutions add AIOps to the toolbelt, leveraging that data with big data, machine learning and analytics. On the monitoring side, it reduces human error, plus it can detect issues automatically in real time and even issue proactive alerts. It also ingests and analyzes these reams of data to offer valuable business insight.

Cloud native observability and the IT road map

“Technologists are moving down the path toward becoming more business-minded, more business-centric,” Ostrowski says. “Businesses don’t have the luxury of waiting for results. The right cloud native solution, the right partners in the industry to make sure you can meet those technology needs, and a complete view of the application stack of the cloud native solution you’ve built, correlated with the business, reveals the impact of business decisions fast, and enables swift course correction.”

Building an effective, future-proofed, business-centric IT roadmap begins with putting an effective management structure in place, and bringing together tools necessary for cloud native observability, he adds. A cloud-first strategy means new teams and new roles — cloud operations teams, DevOps teams focused on modernized applications such as microservices, site reliability engineers and so on.

From a daily operations perspective, each team needs a solution in place that offers them scalability and flexibility, enables them to operate in new ways, knock down the silos within the organization and ensure that the IT infrastructure is able to meet and drive business objectives and customer experiences.

“Technologists have been historically viewed as a cost center,” Ostrowski says. “But now, with the reliance of the business on technology to help drive the outcomes, technologists really need to see themselves as part of the business. They need to understand how their work directly impacts the business, how technology they’re implementing and supporting affects the bottom line. That’s where the cloud native observability piece becomes more important, because as the complexity goes up, observability should not become as complex as the application.”

You can learn more about the power of cloud native observability here.

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