From ‘what?’ to ‘why?’ How full-stack observability is moving developers past application monitoring

Digital services and applications now sit at the heart of customer interactions, the primary platform for organisations to drive engagement, build their brand and grow revenues.

As a result, developers have more responsibility than ever for the commercial success of their organisations. They’re right at the forefront of business, delivering the innovative, personalised, and seamless digital experiences that consumers around the world now demand (and value so highly) each and every time they engage with a brand.

Concurrently, technology continues to evolve to help developers meet these new business imperatives. Widescale adoption of cloud native technologies has dramatically altered the world of application development, instilling agility and speed into the development process and enabling developers to dramatically increase release velocity.

But as a result, the enterprise technology stack is growing ever more complex. A proliferation of endpoints and environments are increasingly connected in dynamic and disparate ecosystems — both on-premises and in the cloud. And unfortunately, many developers are struggling to manage and optimise application availability, performance and security in these complex, hybrid environments. They don’t have full visibility into cloud native environments, nor a clear line of sight for applications with components running across hybrid application landscapes.

Developers want to focus on their core tasks of shipping code, fixing bugs, and helping ensure the security and performance of applications. But they’re increasingly finding themselves stretched too thin, with neither the time nor the tools to adequately monitor enterprise systems. This represents a profound risk for their organisations, with the likelihood of costly disruption or downtime to applications and digital services rising significantly.

Shining a light on complex enterprise technology stacks

Fortunately, full-stack observability provides a platform for developers to address this growing challenge. It goes well beyond traditional application performance monitoring, providing a mechanism for developers to see inside systems and system components including networks, virtual machines, and Kubernetes containers. Its foundations are built on data, and in particular, four types of data: metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT). By bringing to the surface those critical data about components and their interrelationships, it enables developers to create, launch, and manage applications more effectively.

One of its key strengths is that it enables developers to shift the narrative around systems understanding from the “what” and “when”, to the “why.” In doing so, it can help turn systems observability data into practical insights that can inform meaningful actions.

When it comes to maintaining an exceptional digital experience, there are four key factors developers should bear in mind:

Optimisation

Here, the narrative can refocus on cost and efficiency. The sheer complexity of modern systems architectures makes them extremely difficult to visualise and understand. Whether setting up microservices or provisioning infrastructure, the task is made much more difficult by a lack of insights into how each component is working.

Developers therefore often request redundant resources or overestimate the capacity they need. With full-stack observability, developers have full visibility of resources, which enables them to optimise utilisation and remove redundancies. As a result, they can better manage infrastructure costs.

Performance

An observable system is much easier to work with. Greater visibility means that developers can quickly spot issues in their code and isolate bugs earlier in the development lifecycle. It also enables developers to reduce the time spent resolving problems caused by code changes or runtime issues, shortening time to resolution with a system roadmap of troublesome spots. Ultimately, this all translates into less work for the developer and a better experience for the end user.

Security

Developers are under pressure to continuously release code into increasingly complex IT environments. As a result, the ability of team members to spot and close vulnerabilities is becoming increasingly important. Alongside automation, observability can help organisations manage risk within the broader context of their cybersecurity systems, assisting in the move from a ‘monitor-and-react’ model of system management to a paradigm of surveying, interpreting, and acting.

Business context

Running alongside these three key factors is a fourth that interacts with them all: business context. By tracking and measuring system behavior to ensure that customers are getting what they expect from an optimised, performant, and secure technology stack, full-stack observability can help ensure that developers are working strategically and helping to deliver on their business KPIs. With a business lens on application data, developers can identify the issues that pose the biggest threat to digital experience and prioritise their work accordingly, to deliver maximum business impact for their organisations.

Full-stack observability is elevating the developer’s strategic role in the business

With full-stack observability, developers can rapidly access the insights they need to answer practical day-to-day questions. For example, they can explore whether an application is working as required, and if it isn’t, then why.

At a time when many developers are feeling the weight of heightened expectations, full-stack observability helps them to rise to the challenges they face and deliver game-changing value to their organisations. They can meet demand for ever faster rates of innovation, while ensuring that the applications they build and manage deliver the seamless digital experiences that keep customers happy and coming back for more.