Applications and digital services are now the first port of call for consumers to engage with brands, and the front door for organizations across all industries. And as a result, digital experience is without a doubt absolutely critical to business success.
Deliver seamless digital experiences on a consistent basis, and consumers will soon become loyal, valuable customers. But if you get it wrong and provide a substandard digital experience, customers will walk away in droves and share their negative stories far and wide.
These are some of the high stakes developers now face when it comes to building, launching, and maintaining applications and digital services. They are on the front lines of business and their work is fundamental to overall commercial success.
The result is that the pressure increases. Not only are developers being asked to dramatically increase release speed and deliver innovation faster, but they must also ensure that the applications they launch and manage are available, secure and performing at optimal levels at all times.
Unfortunately, in many cases, developers simply don’t have the tools, insight, and time they need to tackle this dual challenge. Pushed to their limits, bogged down in complexity and data noise, they are left on their hind legs, constantly identifying, understanding and resolving performance and security issues before they impact the end-user experience. Therefore, there is an urgent need for organizations to equip their developers with full observability capabilities, regain control and take a more proactive approach to innovation and digital experience.
Global Vice President of Cisco DevNet.
Developers need insight into the application landscape to break through the complexity
It’s clear that developers must find a way to work smarter and faster to meet organizational demands for faster release speed and customer demands for seamless digital experiences.
But this is easier said than done given the complexity of today’s application landscapes. The seismic shift to cloud-native technologies in recent years has given developers a greater range of tools to develop incredible, innovative applications and digital services, but has also led to a massive increase in technical complexity.
Developers are dealing with an endless stream of new components, new endpoints, and new environments, all connected in dynamic and fragmented on-premises and cloud ecosystems. The resulting tech stack is far too complex for developers, or anyone for that matter, to fully understand without the right tools and visibility. Furthermore, having to spend endless hours understanding system architecture gets in the way of developers doing what they should be doing: writing great code, fixing bugs, and ensuring application performance and security.
To overcome this crippling complexity within the IT department, full-stack observability is now essential. It is an evolution and extension of application performance monitoring, giving developers a way to quickly and easily see into systems and their components across the technology stack.
It surfaces information about components and their relationships so developers can better create, launch, and manage applications. It does this by collecting and unifying four major data sets: statistics (numerical measurements collected at regular intervals or over a period of time), events (an individual action that takes place at a certain point in time), logs (text strings with an associated timestamp that represents a system action) and traces (chains of events between different components in an application). Together, these datasets form the raw material for a deeper understanding of systems.
Helps developers focus on essential workflows and answer important questions
The importance of full observability is less about enabling developers to understand the real-time state of systems; instead, the real benefit is allowing developers to focus on essential day-to-day workflows and removing the barriers that prevent rapid delivery and innovation. It provides a mechanism for developers to answer the questions they regularly face, such as “how do I fix this?”, and can help with important decisions around things like adding or eliminating application features and how to best scale applications.
It can also help developers understand the impact that changing certain components will have on the overall application or digital service. This is more important than ever given the increasing use of cloud-based systems by businesses. Reliance on the cloud poses system transparency challenges, and observability tools can provide visibility into these environments.
Enable developers to take a proactive approach to innovation and application performance
With complete and unified visibility into their application landscapes, developers will find it easier to understand system functions that occur when making changes to source code, improving their flexibility and productivity. Additionally, a full-stack observability approach helps developers respond to issues much better, because they don’t have to fight problems as they arise, or rush to understand root causes and dependencies. Instead, they can focus on the more important question of why something went wrong so they can ensure it never happens again.
Another big advantage is that it promotes the integration of developer and operations teams. This is because full-stack observability comes with a shared understanding of the IT-to-customer context, which helps with everything from identifying problems to solving problems and ensuring everyone is pulling in the same direction. It also provides developers with a suite of continuous feedback, learning, and operational intelligence tools, allowing them to deepen their understanding of systems and apply meaningful insights that help them work smarter and faster toward a shared set of business objectives.
Ultimately, the benefits it brings to developers are passed on to consumers in the form of improved application performance, uptime and security. With this in their toolbox, developers are better able to meet the demands placed on them by digital-first companies and align their work with the company’s core objectives, allowing their business to thrive.
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