Here’s why Observability is the cornerstone of Business Success 

In an age where every swipe, click, and tap strings together a virtual narrative, a cataclysmic event in October 2021 jolted the digital world to its core. On October 4, 2021, the mighty pillars of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp came crashing down, triggering a seismic outage that reverberated across the globe. With over 14 million distress signals from users all day, the outage clocked in as one of the longest in history. The disruption was more than just a glitch – it was a wake-up call revealing the profound dependence of modern businesses on the crucial concept of observability.

The outage’s ripple effect went beyond the social media giant’s billions of users; it revealed how Facebook’s integration into countless websites and mobile apps led to disruptions across the digital ecosystem.

Users to Enterprises: The dominance of applications

From consumer-facing enterprises to B2B corporations, the modern business landscape revolves around applications that power diverse functions. Websites, mobile apps, streaming platforms, online banking, emergency services, and more are integral to business operations. For instance, when an Internet Service Provider (ISP) experiences downtime, it ripples through cities, banks, businesses, and various services tied to that specific ISP. Similarly, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) play a pivotal role in responding to surges in demand, enhancing user experience. An outage in any of these critical areas can result from coding glitches, cyberattacks, power incidents, or human errors, disrupting operations and tarnishing reputations.

Double impact

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

When applications experience downtime, the consequences are far-reaching, extending beyond missed business opportunities. It results in irreparable damage to brand reputation, eroding customer trust and causing inconvenience. Failure to monitor mission critical apps seamlessly and in real time compounds the issue, making it challenging to identify performance issues’ root causes. This leads to prolonged downtime, frustrated customers, and a tarnished reputation. Without quick issue diagnosis and resolution, IT teams may opt for temporary fixes that address symptoms but not underlying problems. The urgency for businesses to adopt strategies transcending traditional monitoring approaches and embracing observability becomes evident in such scenarios.

Observability: Beyond monitoring

While monitoring primarily involves tracking predefined metrics and logs to detect known issues, observability assesses system health by analyzing output data, offering actionable insights, and providing a holistic view of the IT environment, enabling proactive issue detection and faster problem resolution. In this sense, observability transcends conventional monitoring of apps by the IT team – it’s a comprehensive process that empowers businesses to gain insights into complex systems. It equips them to understand not only what’s happening but also why it’s happening. By providing granular visibility into interconnected components, observability enables businesses to proactively identify issues before they escalate, ensuring smoother operations and minimizing disruptions, in turn bolstering customer trust, and safeguarding brand equity.

With an observability platform in place, you get real-time insights into metrics, logs, and traces that empower your business to identify the bottleneck causing slowdowns. By proactively addressing issues, businesses can prevent downtime, ensure seamless user experiences, and increase productivity and hence, revenues.

The IBM Instana advantage

As organizations increasingly embrace cloud-native architectures and microservices, the need for a robust observability solution becomes paramount.

To achieve greater speed and proactivity, IT teams need AI-powered observability that leverages high-fidelity, technology-agnostic data. A robust platform like IBM Instana continuously delivers data with 1-second granularity and end-to-end traces while considering logical and physical dependencies across various domains, including mobile, web, applications, and infrastructure.

Real-time insights into application performance, automating the detection of anomalies, and facilitating rapid issue resolution are some of Instana’s features that enable it stand head and shoulders over other platforms. Its holistic approach empowers businesses to enhance user experience, boost operational efficiency, and safeguard brand reputation.

Future anchored in observability

In a world where digital connectivity drives business success, the significance of observability cannot be overstated. The 2021 outage of Facebook’s services underscores the interconnectedness of modern applications and the risks associated with their downtime. By adopting solutions like IBM Instana, businesses can not only mitigate potential disruptions, but also pave the way for seamless operations and enhanced customer experiences.

In an era where resilience and adaptability are paramount, observability stands as a beacon guiding businesses toward a more secure and prosperous future.

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