What’s Your State of Observability Maturity?

By: Brent McKinney | Senior Splunk Consultant

Your MSP Can Help You Mature More Quickly

Splunk recently released its 2nd annual State of Observability Report based on surveys from 1250 observability practitioners, managers, and experts across various industries. It measures their success with observability as the organizations accelerate the transition of workloads to the cloud, public cloud, and multi-cloud environments while also shifting more applications to a cloud-native architecture.

You can download the complete report here.

Key Insights from the Report

It’s clear from the report that observability is becoming a business imperative as organizations embrace cloud-centric environments. It’s also evident that the more mature a company’s observability platform, the greater the ROI and bottom-line impact observability can make in the organization.

Specific findings:

  • ● Companies with robust observability platforms are 2.1x likely to detect problems in internally developed applications in minutes.
  • ● Leaders in observability adoption report a 69% improvement in resolution means time for performance degradation or unplanned downtime.
  • ● Organizations with a mature observability platform achieve an average annual cost of downtime of $2.5 million – compared to $23.8 million for beginner observability platforms and even more-so for companies without any observability platform.

There is a growing recognition that to achieve observability maturity; observability must be built into the DNA of the organization. An increased focus on automation and collaboration are also critical to scaling and maturing observability efforts.

Four Focus Areas for Achieving Observability Maturity

As a Splunk MSP and Splunk 2021 Partner of the Year, TekStream has had a front-row seat in working with clients at all levels of observability maturity, and our experience echoes many of the issues covered in the report.

Here are four critical areas for organizations looking to apply observability to improve their operational efficiency and reduce service-affecting downtime and security vulnerabilities:

1.     Monitor Microservice-Based Architecture

According to the 2021 State of Observability Report, cloud-native applications are significant and expected to grow, with 34% of internally developed applications using containers and microservices-based architecture in a cloud-native environment.

There are many moving parts in a microservices-based architecture, and it can be challenging to get visibility into each. Companies with mature observability protocols know that Splunk can help them monitor each service and the interactions between those services.

Observability provides granular insight into the health of microservices performance and relationships, in real-time, through the open-source open telemetry collector for gathering metrics and traces.

Even better, as the system is built with cloud-native and microservices architectures, Splunk Observability comes with hundreds of integrations and pre-built visualizations.

2.     Ensure True End-to-End Visibility

Splunk Observability tools provide visibility into an application’s health, uptime, and user experience, from infrastructure to front-end performance. This level of visibility allows you to see precisely how the health of one component of an application affects the application’s performance.

Here again, we see organizations that have invested in maturing their observability skill set achieve greater levels of visibility compared with organizations that are starting on their observational journey – although even self-proclaimed beginners in observability can achieve better visibility than those companies with no observability platform.

The report found that 66% of leaders stated their visibility into application performance is excellent. 64% of this same group reported visibility into their security position was excellent. When asked these same questions, only 44% of observability beginners claimed excellent visibility into their application performance, while 42% of beginners stated they had excellent visibility into their security practices.

3.      Gain Confidence with More Reliable and Faster Development

The report found that year over year, confidence in using Splunk Observability for reliable and faster development rose for all levels.

However, only 35% of Spunk Observability users stated they were completely confident that they could meet application performance and availability requirements, whereas 71% of Splunk Observability leaders could confirm confidence across the same areas.

There are a few key areas where Splunk Observability can help organizations gain confidence in their development process:

  • ● Application performance monitoring (APM),
  • ● Distributed tracing
  • ● Log management
  • ● Anomaly Detection

4.     Use Splunk Observability Under the Guidance and Support of Your MSP

Splunk Observability maturation doesn’t happen by accident. It takes careful planning, leadership buy-in, capital investment, and a roadmap to success. It also takes time.

This is where a trusted MSP can provide significant value.

Finding the right partner can help your organization reach maturity quicker, more efficiently, and at a reduced cost. We developed our QuickStream process for Splunk Observability Cloud to begin delivering value in 2-3 weeks. Not months.

Together, we can help you reap the benefits and improved ROI that can come from a mature Splunk Observability implementation:

  • ● Global Monitoring of Amazon Container Services
  • ● Real-time Fidelity Tracing
  • ● Automated Incident Response

The Future State of Observability

The future state of observability is likely to be more data-driven and automated. The proliferation of the cloud and the continued pressure to bring ideas to market quicker will drive the need for organizations to invest in maturing their observability platform. And as systems become more complex, observability will become even more essential. If you’re not already using observability to monitor your system, now is the time to start.

Whether your organization is new to the concept of observability, or your team is well-seasoned with the Splunk Observability Platform, TekStream can help. We have deep experience helping to guide our clients through their observability maturation journey –
regardless of their starting point.

To learn more about our Splunk Observability capabilities, contact us today.