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Applying IT observability to deliver business metrics | Computer Weekly

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Applying IT observability to deliver business metrics | Computer Weekly

The recent Dynatrace Innovate event, which took place earlier this month in Amsterdam, showcased the company’s ambitions to extend observability beyond IT operations.

Analyst Gartner defines observability platforms as the tools organisations use to understand and improve the availability, performance and resilience of critical applications and services. According to Gartner, investment in and successful deployment of observability platforms leads to revenue loss avoidance and enables faster product development cycles and improvements in brand perception.

While these tools provide a way for IT operations and platform engineering teams to look at metrics across the IT stack, Gartner also sees an opportunity for business analysts to use observability platforms to understand and analyse key business metrics.

But the primary use case is in improving the reliability of the ever more complex IT architecture that keeps modern businesses running. At the Innovate 2024 event in Amsterdam, the host invited Deutsche Telekom on stage to talk about how Dynatrace was supporting its OneApp and OneShop applications.

OneApp is used to help customers manage their data consumption, contracts, invoices, credit and orders, while OneShop provides a central e-commerce platform that simplifies product purchases. The telecoms company is using Dynatrace to provide insights into these applications, as well as its entire IT ecosystem, and proactively anticipate and resolve potential disruptions to its digital services.

Improving reliability as IT infrastructure becomes more complex

In his keynote presentation, Dynatrace CEO Rick McConnell said the main lesson to come out of the CrowdStrike global IT outage is the importance of delivering business resilience, given there will be other outages. For Dynatrace, observability and application security are mandatory for business operations.

“Observability has never been more mission critical than it is now,” said McConnell during the keynote presentation at the conference. “Software has never been more critical. Software must just work perfectly.”

Last year, another Dynatrace customer, EDF, rolled out the observability platform to enable its tech teams to tackle performance, reliability and security issues across its customer-facing digital services, which support more than 5.2 million customers across the UK. Dynatrace consolidates multiple tools into one unified observability and security platform.

The energy firm also plans to use Dynatrace’s artificial intelligence (AI)-driven automation technology to help its IT team optimise cloud operations and deliver reliable and secure customer experiences. Dynatrace’s AI monitoring will be used to identify potential inefficiencies in EDF’s tech infrastructure to help the IT team remediate downtime quickly and improve customer self-service.

Linking observability to business metrics

If software can support whatever the business needs to do, then technology is no longer a barrier and observability across the software stack is a technique that can support business initiatives.

For instance, in the Gartner Magic Quadrant report on observability platforms, the analyst firm said such tools can be used for business process and activity monitoring, reflecting user journeys such as login to checkout, funnel analysis to track conversion rates, customer onboarding or loan applications.

One example is retailer Next, which is using Dynatrace across its on-premise and cloud IT systems covering mainframe credit service on-premise to Azure cloud workloads. Next operates its customer-facing services on Kubernetes hosted on Microsoft Azure, and back-end systems, such as fulfilment and its core data store, on-premise. It also links to external services such as payment providers, which need to be monitored too.

To support these requirements, the company is building integration between Dynatrace and ServiceNow, which will be used to help the retailer understand how an IT failure impacts business processes.

Next uses the Dynatrace Platform Subscription licensing model, which enables the company to switch functionality on and off as and when it is needed. This has been advantageous in helping the company with its international expansion, according to Alex Preston, technology development director at Next.

What is interesting about Next’s use of observability is how it can be used to provide more granular insights compared with traditional business intelligence software. “There are differences in territories and amongst groups of customers and different demographics. Some may consider a certain feature or functionality noise; others would consider it essential. Observability gives us a business feedback loop,” said Preston.

When asked about the difference between using an IT observability tool instead of business intelligence software to gain customer insights, Preston said: “I’m not sure you can achieve a very granular level of truth. With business intelligence software, it has a natural propensity to move towards aggregated datasets, and if you are focused on a very small target audience, this may get washed out in the aggregate.”

As Next’s business growth strategy involves international markets, he said: “Next, in some of these markets, needs to get a foothold, and it’s very, very small, and we only get one chance.”

Discussing how observability can be used to monitor business activity, GigaOm analyst Jon Collins said: “It’s pretty clear that operational management holds a key to the next period of technology change.” He added that organisations are looking to mine their existing and new systems to respond to the AI-driven opportunity – however this is framed – which is driving investment in technology.

However, organisations’ current IT estate – data, infrastructure, cloud and applications – is holding back progress, according to Collins. “Solving this first needs visibility, then prioritisation. ‘What have we got?’ and ‘Why is it holding us back?’ become urgent questions to answer,” he said. This is the kind of question Dynatrace hopes its tooling can answer.

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