When application entities become increasingly distributed, so does the data they hold — and that’s a huge challenge for organizations managing and governing expanding complex application environments. According to research, 75% of DevOps initiatives fail to meet expectations due to difficulties working across teams, while 89% of IT leaders say they struggle with data silos.
Unfortunately, without full-stack observability, siloed environments can create friction for application development, security and IT operations. Let’s explore how organizations are bridging the divide by enabling siloed IT functions to share context and better collaborate in support of business goals.
Organizational silos prevent growth and innovation
In the world of IT, silos have long been a problem — and it’s only getting messier as IT environments grow in size and complexity. Individual systems and processes isolate teams from one another, hindering cross-functional collaboration and accurate data analysis that ensures overall business success.
Organizational silos also lead to inefficient business processes and unnecessary blind spots. For example, IT ops teams face limited visibility due to fragmented data spanning different systems and teams. This narrow perspective hinders root cause identification and remediation and cannot help with prioritization efforts.
Issues can also extend to larger business initiatives. With obscured data and poorly understood processes, developers may miss opportunities, expose systems to security issues and engage in unnecessary risks.
As an organization grows, silos tend to grow deeper and more disjointed. This occurs despite that every function across an application lifecycle, from developers to IT and SecOps, needs to be on the same page.
Full-stack observability provides end-to-end insight and correlation
Traditional, siloed application monitoring allows individual teams to identify and resolve issues within a single domain. But this does not take into account the full stack. In contrast, full-stack observability takes a more holistic approach, helping teams understand complex interdependencies across applications, from code development, security of application libraries, application method calls and network congestion to gain actionable insights tied to business priorities such as accounting for user experience.
Full-stack observability helps teams move away from domain-specific monitoring to gain a shared view of the entire technology ecosystem. As such, it’s a powerful strategy that brings teams together to solve big problems. For example, it enables developers to deploy digital innovation at scale without sacrificing security, whether the application environment is hybrid or cloud-based. Let’s dive in for a little more detail.
Agile and cloud-based initiatives
Research reveals that 94% of large enterprises and 84% of mid-sized organizations already operate within multi-cloud environments. Reactive monitoring isn’t sufficient for these companies to analyze the onslaught of data they receive. Additionally, trying to navigate between disparate tools or just relying on cloud service providers’ monitoring tools isn’t efficient, nor does it provide holistic insights across the ecosystem. Real-time insights are needed to effectively manage and protect hybrid and multi-cloud application environments, and when they don’t exist, business outcomes can suffer.
Full-stack observability allows technologists to diagnose and resolve performance and security issues across all layers supporting the application infrastructure, regardless of where it lives. Adopting this strategy improves an organization’s ability to deliver high-performing, secure applications — while keeping an eye on cost challenges inherent in expanding cloud services.
Strategic business goals and digital transformation
Full-stack observability with business context helps technologists connect application health and security issues with business objectives so remediation efforts are well aligned with company goals. By monitoring across all layers of an application and correlating performance and security with business-critical transactions, teams can focus on what matters most to the organization.
Development of proactive business practices
Cisco AppDynamics collects telemetry data such as metrics, events, logs and traces (MELT), unifying all pertinent information in a single interface. This helps technologists understand application, database and infrastructure performance, the user’s experience and any underlying security vulnerability or threat in detail to help identify, prioritize and fix underlying issues or risks quickly.
AppDynamics also standardizes metrics and logs, allowing cross-functional teams to compare data across the technology stack in a shared view. This enables teams to communicate and make decisions more efficiently, ultimately allowing them to:
- Strengthen security
By simply enabling Cisco Secure Application, technologists gain insights into existing and undiscovered vulnerabilities ranked in priority order based on the likelihood of exploitation. Giving your DevOps and security teams shared context supports DevSecOps by making security checks part of the development processes. In doing so, security vulnerability checking is baked into applications from the beginning — without compromising velocity or performance. - Improve customer satisfaction
Gaining insights into application health across user experiences and business-critical transactions enables teams to see and fix disruptions before they impact users. With a stable and responsive infrastructure and the right observability tool, developers can release new products and features securely on time — to elevate end-user experience challenges. - Accelerate innovation
With less time spent on data analysis and firefighting, ITOps has more bandwidth to support developers and improve infrastructure long term. Working with developers, orgs can ensure technology investments align with roadmaps and growth initiatives that support optimization and innovation needed to outpace the competition. - Optimize costs and resources
Full-stack observability allows infrastructure teams to model what-if scenarios accurately, forecast capacity and gain insights into cloud costs. With these tools, they can adjust capacity as needed, improving performance and reducing unnecessary expenses.
Uniting teams for exceptional user experiences
Full-stack observability gives IT teams tools and insights to handle a growing and dispersed application environment by supporting shared context for a harmonious and collaborative environment. Adopting a full-stack observability strategy not only closes the gap between application development, security and IT operations but propels the business towards a shared mission: boosting application performance, strengthening infrastructure, enhancing security and crafting unforgettable user experiences that support business growth.
Ready to elevate digital experiences?
Schedule a demo to explore how Cisco AppDynamics can give you complete visibility across your technology stack, enabling teams to work in harmony and deliver flawless digital experiences.
