Sound Bytes: IT leaders on the importance of full-stack observability

September 16 2021
 

We chatted with top IT leadership about the impact that full-stack observability has on their business. Here’s what they had to say.


Group of light bulbs with one lit representing full-stack observability

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to increase demand for premium digital experiences, companies are evolving and introducing modern technologies into their IT architecture on a large scale to keep pace with the competition. The resulting level of complexity and data noise leaves them scrambling to manage a landscape fraught with new challenges and a myriad of risks.

Without end-to-end visibility across their application ecosystem, IT teams struggle to identify the root cause of performance issues and prioritize the most critical fixes. Monitoring domain-centric tools, hybrid cloud environments and third-party applications is a huge effort, especially when resources are already limited. And disparate topologies create security vulnerabilities, which are heightened when dependencies aren’t apparent.

Technologists are starting to recognize that they need a way to observe their entire IT estate simultaneously and gain deep, real-time insights in order to continue successfully innovating and delivering exceptional end user experiences. Only then can they and the business contextualize data, collaborate, and make rapid decisions to optimize costs and drive revenue.

Enter full-stack observability.

We asked some top IT leaders about the impact that full-stack observability has on their organization and how it helps their teams view their full tech stack through a business lens. Here’s what they had to say.

Tim Masey, Carhartt, Vice President of IT Infrastructure & Security

“Full-stack observability will provide the crystal ball that allows us to anticipate customer needs and proactively shape rather than reactively respond to issues related to the user experience. The must-have for us is to simplify complexity for business users while still facilitating deep data dives and visualizations for IT teams, as well as integrations with critical applications.”

Adam Rasner, AutoNation, Vice President of Technology Operations

“The automotive industry has never really pushed itself to meet the needs of the digitally native consumer, so this is a huge opportunity to literally reshape what we know as the car buying experience, but there’s a good deal of innovation that has to take place in order to make this transformation happen. We’re enhancing some legacy applications that are more than 15 years old and developing new cloud-native solutions, all the while putting systems in place that provide our IT teams with the end-to-end visibility across our entire application delivery chain that they need to ensure everything’s running properly and deliver exceptional customer experiences.”

Chris Younger, Freedom Financial Network, Senior Vice President

“When a new customer contacts us, we know we have just seconds to connect with them to start the relationship. We run a number of technologies behind the scenes to facilitate those relationships, and we need comprehensive, real-time visibility into how each one is performing to deliver a superior and memorable customer experience.”

Naveen Kumar Kodali, Cisco, Senior Technical Program Manager, Business Intelligence and Analytics

“We’ve achieved a 50% reduction in our mean time to discovery (MTTD) because of better data and analytics. And since we’ve significantly expanded our monitoring capabilities to every layer of our tech stack, we’ve averted dozens of potential incidents that could have further impacted our customers. Full-stack observability allows us to be everything our customers expect the global leader in connectivity to be — connected, responsive and always on their side.”

Mike Karasienski, Carhartt, Supervisor of Systems Engineering

“Our MSO application, which is responsible for materials planning and inventory control that powers our entire just-in-time manufacturing and distribution model, is 100% essential to our success but became the single most significant choke point for our operations. The teams supporting the MSO application didn’t have good enough visibility to understand whether a slowdown or outage was actually a problem with the application itself or caused by something on the infrastructure side. It underscored just how important granular visibility and root cause analysis is to our success.”

>>> Want to learn more about how technologists are managing soaring IT complexity by connecting full-stack observability with business context? Check out our Agents of Transformation 2022: Innovating in the Experience Economy report.

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