Retailers must embrace application observability to sustain rapid pace of innovation
By Gregg Ostrowski
These are challenging times for almost all corners of the retail sector, with rising costs of living putting a squeeze on consumer spending and global socio-economic uncertainty continuing to impact supply chains.
Against this backdrop, retail organizations are looking to digital transformation to streamline operations and to differentiate in the market, by offering customers ever more intuitive and personalized digital and omnichannel experiences. Speed of innovation continues to accelerate, powered largely by the growing deployment of cloud native technologies which are allowing IT teams to dramatically boost release velocity.
At the same time, digital transformation budgets are coming under much closer scrutiny, as organizations look to get a grip on IT spending after the ‘whatever it takes’ approach which (understandably) characterized the response to the pandemic. In the latest research from Cisco AppDynamics, The Age of Application Observability, 79% of retail technologists report that they are facing increasing pressure to validate the impact of cloud investments.
These dynamics are combining to create a perfect storm within many IT departments. Most technologists simply don’t have the visibility and insights required to manage highly complex hybrid environments, nor do they have a clear line of sight of applications where components are running across cloud native and on-premises technologies. Not only is this making it incredibly difficult to effectively troubleshoot availability and performance issues before they impact end users, it’s also making it almost impossible for IT leaders to track and measure the impact of innovation on customer and business outcomes.
In response, growing numbers of retailers are now recognizing an urgent need to move beyond traditional application monitoring tools, and embracing application observability as a way to cut through complexity and ensure that applications are operating at peak performance at all times. Application observability provides IT teams with unified visibility across all IT environments – whether on-premises or in the cloud – and to correlate IT performance data with business metrics. Crucially, this allows IT leaders to validate the impact of their investments and to deliver rapid innovation on a more sustainable basis.
Cloud native technologies and the explosion of data
Cloud native technologies are enabling IT teams to embed speed, agility, and resilience into their development processes. In fact, two thirds of retail technologists believe that migration to cloud native technologies will allow their organization to increase application development speeds by at least four times. This is staggering given the extent to which innovation speeds have already evolved over recent years.
However, the shift to cloud native is leading to an explosion of data within IT departments, with microservices and containers spawning overwhelming volumes of metrics, events, logs and traces (MELT) data. Currently, most IT teams don’t have a way to cut through this data noise. They’re still deploying separate, siloed tools to monitor on-premises and cloud technologies, and therefore they can’t easily detect issues and understand root causes across hybrid environments. The inevitable result of this is unrelenting pressure on IT teams and increased Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR).
Retailers are turning to application observability to maximize their innovation investments
Faced with this growing challenge, 85% of retail technologists state that application observability is now a strategic priority for their organization and, encouragingly, 50% report that their organization is already exploring application observability solutions.
Application observability allows IT teams to take a more proactive approach to managing their hybrid IT environment, integrating security into the application lifecycle from day one and bringing teams together around a single source of data. Technologists can access deeper insight into each area of their IT estate, enabling them to detect issues, understand root causes and remediate far more quickly.
As the pace of innovation continues to accelerate over the coming years, application observability allows organizations to embed speed and agility into their development processes. Technologists can get onto the front foot, rather than being stuck in firefighting mode, scrambling to identify and resolve issues in a timely manner.
Crucially, given the heightened pressure for IT leaders to demonstrate the value of cloud investments, application observability allows technologists to correlate application performance data with business transactions so they can evaluate the impact of technology on the business. Retailers can approach innovation in a more controlled and sustainable manner, directing their time and budgets according to what will deliver the greatest returns. Indeed, 90% of retail technologists believe that application observability with business context will enable them to be more strategic and spend more time on innovation. And this is something that every retailer in the world surely needs right now.
(The author is Gregg Ostrowski, CTO Advisor, Cisco AppDynamics, and the views expressed in this article are his own)
