ESG video: Companies need cloud native observability

Companies getting started on their cloud native journeys can quickly become overwhelmed as they try to understand current observability trends and challenges.

That’s why independent analyst firm ESG (Enterprise Strategy Group) teed up the hottest topics in the recent webinar, 3 Trends in cloud native and observability you need to know. The webinar breaks down key findings from ESG’s report, “Observability from Code to Cloud,” which surveyed over 357 IT, DevOps, and application development professionals from across North America and offers insights about today’s trends and challenges in cloud native observability.

In the <5-minute webinar preview video below, ESG Senior Analysts, Paul Nashawaty (application infrastructure monetization) and Rob Strechay (cloud, DevOps, and observability), provide a snapshot of ESG’s observability report data. Nashawaty and Strechay walk us through what the current adoption of observability looks like, challenges arising for organizations, and how these teams are meeting roadblocks.

According to Nashawaty and Strechay, organizations today have three key goals in adopting cloud native:

1. Growth
2. Expand operational efficiencies
3. Respond rapidly to the customer journey

Nashawaty notes that: “Overall, organizations are looking to modernize and grow their business, but they’re looking to do this rapidly. And with organizations leveraging cloud native as a faster way to deploy and deliver, they’re doing this with cloud native over traditional applications.”

In fact, according to the report, 90% of organizations believe that cloud native is a faster way to drive their businesses and respond to business KPIs. Strechay adds that other benefits include that organizations are able to “increase their developer velocity, app portability, and their ability to bring heritage applications together with their modern infrastructures as components of them.”

While the move to cloud native offers critical advantages for teams, it certainly doesn’t come without challenges. Strechay notes in one report finding, respondents said there are at least three areas of the organization that need focus:

• Security (34% of respondents)
• Compliance (30% of respondents)
• Observability (29% of respondents)

As Nashawaty mentions: “Observability has a large impact on businesses and business outcomes. And when we look at observability data, it’s increasing in scale faster than the rate of production.”

Strechay notes that the data growth is exponential, which is leading to challenges such as inflated costs, greater complexity, and longer MTTR. Yet those same organizations are managing data growth through the use of new tooling and processes to have better business outcomes.

“It’s interesting to see what their big pushes are,” said Strechay, noting ESG’s survey data:

• 25% of organizations are tying observability to their business KPIs.
• The top four responses were all tied to better team alignment, better Ops groups, or actionable business outcomes.

As expected, the report found IT leadership and Ops teams are the personas most interested in observability. However, executive leadership outside of IT (37%) topped the list as well. This indicates the growing importance of observability and how its business impact has expanded beyond the observability teams as customers and teams become more digitally native.

The report also delves into how businesses are able to be more resilient and how observability is driving business results. Survey data from the report revealed that scale and reliability topped the lists for deployment and ongoing operations within the observability practice.

“The ability to scale from the beginning is really important, because once you get into it, it’s really hard to scale out later,” said Strechay, explaining this is why it’s important for organizations to ask themselves how an observability tool can help you scale for today, how easy is it to implement, and how they scale later.

What does “cloud native” promise organizations? Rapid response, agility and efficiency. Monitoring and management is not just beneficial – it’s critical to the overall success of organizations.

Watch the clip below, and register to watch the full on demand version here.