Observe Ability: What’s Next for Observability in the 2022 Cloud Era

Spiros Xanthos, VP, Product Management, Observability and IT Operations at Splunk, discusses what organizations can expect amid the 2022 cloud era and the critical role observability will play in business modernization.

Over the past year, the cloud quickly became the go-to vehicle for dealing with uncertainty brought on by the pandemic. Digital acceleration skyrocketed as organizations adapted to meet the evolving needs of their customers. In turn, we saw the speed and scale of cloud adoption increase across industries, with 90% of organizations leveraging cloud computing today. As businesses continually modernize to mitigate disruptions for end-users, the stakes of digital experiences are higher than ever, and having proper visibility is key to ensuring customer satisfaction. 

In 2022, we will see a rapid migration of microservices and containerized workloads to the cloud. The emphasis will be on complete visibility around how the pieces work together at any given point in the process. Having the full picture of everything happening in your cloud environment is imperative for business success. Organizations need observability to make sense of the hundreds to thousands of microservices working across their ephemeral cloud infrastructures.

Four Key Predictions for Observability in 2022

Here are four key predictions with observability this year as the digital acceleration continues and full-fledged visibility becomes an increasingly vital asset.

1. Increased popularity of observability

Monitoring solutions from cloud providers usually only feed into another data silo. Data tends to get locked away and can’t be consumed by larger groups to be correlated with other data sources. On top of this, the features and functionality that cloud providers offer in their monitoring solutions can be restrictive. When it comes to functionality and usability, it seems many providers simply strive for “good enough.” 

Full-fidelity (accuracy in the details) and connecting bytes of data in ways that make sense economically is crucial. By connecting everything data-wise — metrics, traces, logs, events, incidents — a more effective tool can be built on top to provide answers back to the user with total confidence. That’s why observability, having the ability to answer any question about a business or application through the gathering and examination of data, is more important than ever in the era of the cloud. 

See More: 6 Best Tools to Bridge the Observability Gap in Serverless Architectures

2. Further adoption of observability in DevOps

While advancements in DevOps and cloud-native practices are booming, it’s important to strictly monitor and observe metrics, logs, analytics and datasets related to infrastructure performance to optimize system dependability. That is why we will see increased adoption of observability from DevOps teams in 2022. 

Observability allows DevOps developers to understand an application’s internal state at any moment and have access to more precise information about system faults in distributed production environments. Not only this, with observability, developers gain better alerting, workflows and increased speed of delivery. Accelerated developer velocity and visibility also enable teams to spend less time in meetings and more time making adjustments to their applications and services without compromising the stability of their systems. That is increasingly important in today’s cloud-first environments, where each second of downtime can cost an organization thousands.

3. Security to help drive observability maturity 

Security teams are heavy users of monitoring already, deploying a range of tools to uncover known threats. However, most of these tools tend to fall short. Security teams are starting to recognize that all data is in scope, not only the traditional data sources. Observability that’s security-centered moves the discussion from what teams are already aware of to finding and discovering new threats and attack patterns emerging while also repairing existing breaches. 

For security pros, observability provides advantages within advanced routing tasks, detailed data enrichment and more. The increased volume and quality of information enables teams to ask more thoughtful data questions. Additionally, observability supports AIOps adoption to elevate data monitoring and refine security issue identification. As a result, teams are better equipped to conduct efficient and thorough post-mortems on security events. As security teams explore the benefits of observability this year, the demand for more accessibility will rise along with the need for better tools to manage it. We’ll also see these needs increase as migration from legacy platforms to modern solutions continues.

4. The power of observability

2022 will be the year where observability moves beyond just a buzzword. With increased complexities created by emerging technologies, it’s more important than ever for organizations to have proper visibility into their systems — regardless of where they are on their digital transformation journeys.

Observability cannot be ignored with the plethora of data created from the cloud, microservers, containers, and other technologies. For organizations to operate efficiently, keep customers happy, and drive business impact, they need a clear picture of how their infrastructure is running. In fact, the 2021 State of Data Impact Report by Splunk found that the leader-defined cohort was 6.1 times likelier to have accelerated root cause identification and were more innovative, having developed 60 percent more new products or services in the preceding 12 months than organizations with a basic, beginner-level approach to observability.

Effective observability provides all the instrumentation and analytic horsepower organizations need to capture and contextualize their system’s output, and deliver the insights required to thrive in the world of modern distributed systems. I look forward to seeing the popularity of observability grow this year and the impact it will have beyond.

How are you preparing for observability this year? Tell us on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We’d love to hear from you!