Pressure mounts on technologists to prevent high-profile digital service disruption

When Facebook and its associated services went down in early October, it was an unexpected reminder for everyone – end users and tech leaders alike – that this type of incident can happen in the blink of an eye. But it also shone a light on how difficult it can be to get it back under control and limit the damage in terms of reputation.

We live in an always-on era. Expectations towards the availability of applications and digital services have only intensified during the pandemic, putting unimaginable pressure on the IT teams that deliver these services. Great digital experiences and their continual enhancements need to be deployed quickly and deliver consistently crisp performance. In the UAE, which is bouncing back from the economic backlash of Covid-19, enterprises cannot afford a major incident or service disruption.

To assess the situation, AppDynamics conducted a global survey of 1,000 IT decision makers across 11 countries, including the UAE. The intent was to gauge the level of concern surrounding digital disruption to their organisations and the measures they have in place to mitigate such issues.

Mounting pressure

In the UAE, 90 per cent of respondents said they were concerned to some degree about the impact of a major outage of their digital services, and 87 per cent indicated they were under pressure from their leadership to prevent performance disruption. It seems that technologists across all industries are in for some sleepless nights as they respond to the expectations which users now have.

Technologists are facing sky-high customer expectations as a consequence of changing behaviours during the pandemic. This challenge is compounded by increasing complexity across their IT stack. The IT environment has morphed into a vast patchwork of legacy and cloud technologies. So, the platforms on which digital services are created, enhanced, tested, and deployed now reside in a complex hybrid environment that needs to be understood before teams can start guaranteeing deliverables such as performance and uptime. It is a lot to deal with for UAE technologists, 95 per cent of whom see this heightened complexity as the direct cause of delays in troubleshooting performance issues. They do not have the visibility required to drill down and identify the causes of issues, much less predict them before they impact the end user.

The tools we have versus the tools we need

For those tasked with preventing major incidents, this presents a problem, unless they have the tools in place to deliver actionable insights in a timely fashion. Encouragingly, 98 per cent of UAE IT teams report that they currently have some monitoring tools in place, but only 36 per cent expressed total confidence in those tools to meet their needs. This is likely because many monitoring tools still fail to cover the entire technology stack, including legacy, hybrid, and cloud environments.

Technologists in the UAE are not blind to this capability gap, with 81 per cent indicating that their company should deploy a full-stack observability solution within the next 12 months to help them manage complexity across their IT estate and to identify and fix the root causes of performance issues.

Full-stack observability puts technology teams back in control of their ecosystems, allowing them to monitor up and down the stack and proactively manage performance issues before they impact the end user. Unified, real-time visibility into performance issues from one end of the digital estate to the other means delivering monitoring capabilities from customer-facing applications right through to core infrastructure such as compute, storage, network, and the public internet, as well as every dependency between services. This comprehensive coverage is the only way to guarantee quick identification of issues and where their root causes can be found.

Metrics for prioritisation

But even if technologists manage to deliver the visibility needed to track issues in real time, they also need a monitoring platform that will sift out the issues with the highest impact on business outcomes such as sales, transactions or customer experience. To prioritise actions, each identified issue must be analysed through a business lens. Full-stack observability will best serve its goal by allowing technologists to tie IT performance to customer-centric business metrics.

When you experience a very public outage, your brand reputation takes a hit. Every UAE business should consider how IT could have a central part in their development strategy in order to help them meet their business goals and use full-stack observability to deliver competitive experiences for all.