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Observability is a practice that delivers a holistic view of your entire IT estate to improve operations, security, and AI adoption. It goes beyond simple, rules-based monitoring to give you a broader and deeper picture of your IT environment and assets.
“Observability” and “monitoring” are two more terms that executives and IT teams often mistake for each other. Many of them believe “observability” is just a new word for “monitoring”, and that they already have it established. However, there are some critical differences between the two. Let’s look at the key points of observability vs monitoring.
Observability is a broad concept that can fold in anything that provides a broader, deeper, and more interconnected picture of how your entire environment functions. However, there are three pillars of observability that every organization must first collect and connect to establish meaningful observability.
Metrics are the basic numerical measures of an application, system, or network’s performance, that quantify its behavior, events, and components. They can include everything from classification records — like the date and time of an event — to KPIs like memory, CPU usage, and error rates. Metrics can be collected from a wide range of external and internal sources, and then correlated, visualized, and analyzed any number of ways.
The right observability tools will give you visibility and control over your applications, systems, and networks. With this visibility and control, you will gain a few key capabilities, including the following.
Observability tools give you both a broad and detailed view of your entire IT estate.
The right tools will give you a birds-eye view of your IT infrastructure, as well the ability to ask granular questions about what’s working and what isn’t.
This view will help you do two things.
First, it will help you define a complete, accurate, and up-to-date picture of what a “good” operating and security state looks like in your environment.
Second, it will help you identify any applications, systems, or networks that are behaving improperly, and quickly remediate them.
Third, it will help you spot potential vulnerabilities and fragilities ahead of time, and let you address them before they are exploited or break and cause an incident.
The result? You can develop a more robust operating and security environment — and collect the data needed to demonstrate these improvements over time.
Observability tools make it faster and easier to resolve IT incidents.
The right tools will paint a clear picture of any incident that occurs, including what caused it, how far it spread, and how to best remediate it across your entire IT estate.
This comprehensive visibility will help you do a few things.
First, you can detect incidents much faster, and map their full scope — identifying every asset they touched that need to be remediated.
Second, you can perform a root cause analysis and identify what caused an incident and how to best remediate it much faster.
Third, you can effectively collaborate between teams to remediate the incident, and have complete visibility into whether your remediation actions were effective.
The result? You will lower your mean time to repair (MTTR), your remediations will be more effective, and you will have more confidence that you resolved incidents in full.
Observability tools provide context for security or operational incidents.
The right tools will show you every asset in your IT environment, including the myriad ways that they interact, interconnect, and are interdependent upon each other.
This deep understanding of your complex IT estate will help you do a few things.
First, during an incident you can better understand what changed, how it changed, when it changed — across every asset directly impacted by the event.
Second, you can understand how a single compromised asset might cause ripples across your entire IT estate due to its interactions with every other asset you deploy.
Third, you can use these contextual views of your IT estate to quarantine impacted assets during an incident, or to proactively harden your IT estate through segmentation.
The result? You will provide context for your incident management activities, and minimize any operational and security disruptions you might incur.
By developing comprehensive observability, you will generate a wide range of benefits. These include, but are not limited to:
With observability, you can find every instance of known vulnerabilities and fragilities within your entire IT stack. You will also find new patterns that suggest “unknown unknown” issues in your environment causing performance or security issues.
For both known and unknown issues, observability will help you:
Discover, troubleshoot, and resolve incidents, vulnerabilities, and fragilities faster — everywhere they occur in your environment.
Gain visibility into control of new assets that enter your environment, and map the interconnections they create.
Establish predictive analytics and automation to resolve potential incidents before they occur.
Harden your environment against security or operational incidents.
Observability gives development teams more visibility into their work, and the organization’s IT infrastructure. This makes it easier to find and fix potential issues during development, and to push out applications and updates faster and more effectively.
When you establish comprehensive visibility, developement teams will:
Spend less time resolving problems and experience less downtime, freeing them to focus on their core work.
Gain a broader and deeper understanding of their IT estate, the user experiences it drives, and their applications’ place within it all.
Collaborate more effectively with other teams within the organization, during both development and incident resolution.
Adjust, improve, and extend their applications without negatively impacting the performance of the environment.
With observability, everyone in the organization receives more and fresher data. This will allow nearly everyone in your organization to make better decisions, work more collaboratively, and submit fewer requests to IT teams.
Real-time data generated by observability allows your team to:
Create better, more complete, and more accurate visualizations, reports, and dashboards for your teams and executives to work from
Develop real-time visibility into the user experience, better understand user journeys, and improve every step that they take.
Maintain system uptime and data availability, reducing the volume and burden of help desk tickets and data requests.
Respond faster to incidents and opportunities at every level of the organization.
With observability, you gain the visibility and control you need to build a more shock-proof organization at every level, which will allow you to prevent potential issues from occurring and withstand and recover from incidents faster.
With observability, your organization will:
Increased security, reducing the opportunities for security incidents, and the duration and severity of any incidents that do occur.
Improve operations, resolving performance issues proactively across the entire organization at a root cause level.
Mitigate potential issues by identifying the interdependencies between your assets, and limiting them to the minimum necessary connections.
Manage risk more effectively, by understanding the full impact of all IT operations and security decisions, and making more informed decisions.
Observability is becoming even more powerful — and even more critical for every enterprise — due to the rise in AIOps.
AIOps refers to using artificial intelligence (AI) to maintain the uptime of IT infrastructure by detecting and investigating incidents faster. Done right, AIOps will not only accelerate MTTR, but it will also perform more extensive incident mapping, more exhaustive root cause analysis, and overall provide a more accurate and complete picture of an incident.
In addition, AIOps can be leveraged to identify and prevent IT issues by following the same basic process on healthy infrastructure to spot and diagnose potential issues and suggest remediation efforts for security or operational vulnerabilities in the IT estate.
The more data about the environment AIOps receives, the better it works. As such, AIOps and observability go hand-in-hand. By establishing observability across the entire IT environment, you give AI all of the data it needs to scour, analyze, and provide actionable recommendations on every asset in your IT estate.
In short: Leveraging observability and AIOps together helps decision makers like CIOs and site reliability engineers (SREs) make faster, more informed, and more accurate decisions.
While establishing both observability and AIOps might seem like a big lift, we’ve made it simple for enterprises. We’ve developed a single solution that combines observability and generative AI to provide AIOps out-of-the-box.
Our BMC Helix for Observability and AIOps solution is a recognized industry leader in its category that provides every essential capability to establish both observability and AIOps within your IT stack.
These core capabilities include:
To learn more about BMC Helix for Observability and AIOps, click here.
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