In the face of complex IT landscapes, observability isn’t just a buzzword—it’s your key to unlocking seamless digital performance. It’s not a one-time fix; it’s a dynamic, ongoing journey that aligns with your business goals for continuous enhancement.
A journey of continuous improvement
Implementing an observability strategy is an iterative process, not a one-off task. It requires continuous improvement based on system and business changes. Organizations that excel at getting value from observability are the ones that continually revisit and revise their strategy, aligning technological requirements to business goals.
An effective observability strategy distinguishes between proactively tracking and remediating issues and seeing a small problem accelerate and heavily impact the business. Your chosen observability tools should integrate with your current technology stack to make your plans successful. In addition, tools should be user friendly and provide relevant insights in real-time via dashboards, reports and queries.
“A mature observability practice paves the way for greater reliability, better performance, higher revenue, and happier customers,” maintains Orange Business observability partner Splunk.
Six tips for building a robust observability strategy
1. Pinpoint your goals
Start with the end in mind. Define clear business outcomes and identify the metrics that matter most. This ensures your observability efforts yield actionable insights.
2. Sync with data governance
Observability isn’t a standalone effort. It must align with your data governance strategy, ensuring quality, compliance and actionable data lineage, which is invaluable regarding compliance with regulations.
3. Build a strong foundation
Build on a unified data platform with standardized metrics, logs and traces. This consistency is the bedrock of scalability and reliability.
4. Leverage the strength of APIs
APIs are the pulse points of your applications and IT systems. Build your observability ecosystem by integrating with existing applications and systems via APIs to gain real-time health checks and performance metrics across the entire stack. Only by doing so can enterprises harvest real-time insights and metrics holistically and use this intelligence to rectify application and infrastructure availability, security and performance problems.
5. Implement use cases with precision
Turn your use cases into reality. Design dashboards that focus on the data that is most critical to your stakeholders, ensuring clarity and value.
6. Ensure dashboard discipline
Observability dashboards are pivotal to monitoring the effectiveness of an observability strategy. Create a user-centric dashboard and outline a framework for iterative refinement based on feedback and evolving requirements.
Observability is an evolving and progressive journey
A mature observability practice leads to greater reliability, better performance, higher revenue and happier customers.
With Orange Business and Splunk, you’re not just adopting observability, you’re embracing a partnership that brings to the table expertise in consultancy, overall design, interoperability, data integration, overall migration, Dev Ops and lifecycle management skills.
Ready to dive deeper? Download our eBook How Observability Can Bring Value To Your Business, and start your journey to a more reliable, high-performing IT and business environment.
I am the Go to Market Lead on the value proposition "Observability powered by Splunk" as part of Digital Solutions Europe at Orange Business. I have a rich mix of international business development, product design and strategic operations and business management experience from more than 25 years in the telecommunications and financial services industries.