Observability's resurgence is pinned to user experience: Gartner

Enterprise observability tooling is enjoying a resurgence as enterprises look to manage and improve the way end users experience applications and platforms, according to Gartner's senior director analyst Padraig Byrne.

Byrne told iTnews that the difference between modern observability and traditional monitoring tools is that current implementation efforts put the customer at the centre.

“We're thinking about the user, not about the infrastructure,” Byrne said.

“If you're a bank and you're rolling out a new mobile application, you want to ensure that your clients have the best experience possible because we know that when clients have a poor experience with their applications, they're much more likely to become dissatisfied, they're more likely to churn, they use the product less, and therefore less revenue attached to these applications and a decrease in customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.”

Observability enables organisations to identify areas of friction for customers to improve their experience with the application, he said.

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“The key reason people want observability is that it gives them insight to their client experience or their end user experience in some way, and how these applications and critical services are performing.

“With observability, the key thing is that you're looking to find out about these problems before your clients do.”

Flight Centre Travel Group is using enterprise observability tools from ThousandEyes.

According to CIO Chris Locke, the organisation is improving customer experience by dramatically reducing its time to troubleshoot issues.

“What used to take weeks is now down to hopefully only a couple of hours, being able to pinpoint that problem, put in place the fix, and get users back using,” he said.

Barriers to use

According to Byrne, a key barrier to observability is a lack of experience using monitoring tools.

“For organisations that have not had much interaction with monitoring tools in the past, it can be very difficult really to get a mindset in place, which allows for modern observability, and that is because people are not really used to spending money on these tools,” he said.

“You implement a system and there's an expectation that it will work. Why do I need to measure that?

"And then it becomes very evident that if your clients are unhappy and dissatisfied, then they walk elsewhere.

"So, you need to get ahead of this. The mindset needs to change.”