By Michael Kedik, Xigent VP Offering Management
Xigent’s Full-Stack Observability Blog Series (Part 5 of 6)
Throughout our series on Full-Stack Observability, our FSO expert, Ed Ferron, has provided a well-rounded view of what FSO is, its various benefits, and key components. In this 5th installment, Ed will give you critical questions to ask, best times to implement, and the challenges of in-house implementation of Full-Stack Observability.
Every great journey has multiple steps. Frodo’s journey would have been impossible without the help of his friends along the way. Luke would’ve had his hands full with Darth Vader if he hadn’t taken the first step of leaving his home. Although you might not be saving Middle Earth or an entire galaxy far, far away, taking these four steps along your journey to FSO will help save your company time & money.
Step 1: Understanding the Problem
Addressing the problem at hand is the first step to take. This may be a complicated conversation, but knowing what operations and departments are not rising to their potential is crucial. This allows for transparency of what is lacking and goal setting for where you want to be in the future.
“The first step on a customer’s journey to Full-Stack Observability is understanding the business problem that we’re trying to address and how your application impacts your business.”
Step 2: Timing
We often get the question, “When is the best time to implement Full-Stack Observability?”. The answer varies depending on the type of company and the potential outcomes desired. On average, we have seen high success rates around product and application launches, as well as areas where end-user experience is a high priority.
“In our experience, we’ve seen customers have tremendous success with their new product launches or new application launches when they’ve budgeted, and planned, to have Full-Stack Observability at the beginning of that project as part of the entire platform.”
Step 3: Understanding
There’s no denying it; every company is different. With each company being diverse in its strengths, weaknesses, and overall operations, we take time to sit down and understand the company, its values, and its goals. The beauty of Full-Stack Observability is that it is not a “one size fits all” approach, and because of that, we work as an extension of your company.
“Some of the key steps in our approach to implementing Full-Stack Observability is first to understand the applications that we’re trying to monitor and what makes those applications successful.”
Step 4: Partnership
Partnership is the most crucial step in your journey to Full-Stack Observability. Establishing a cohesive culture where teams are unified under one primary language and work together is extremely important. Although this can be accomplished in-house, Ed mentions it might cause more headaches than help.
“We often see customers try and implement Full-Stack Observability in-house, and then they end up partnering with someone like us to help them on their journey. The challenge with trying to bring FSO in-house is that teams are used to monitoring in their own silos. The network team monitors the network, the server team monitors the server, and the app team creates logs, and very few times do they develop a common language that they all can speak across that elevates monitoring and observability to the business level.
Xigent comes in with our business-first approach, and we help those teams communicate across a common language that elevates all the metrics that they’re monitoring to the business level so we can measure impact. The other challenge we often see with companies trying to do this on their own is they lack the expertise of the platforms. Xigent has deep expertise across many platforms in this space, so we can help with the best tools and integrate those tools into your enterprise alerting and monitoring systems.”
The journey to Full-Stack Observability is not a difficult one. Yet, like all good things, it does require some reflection to address the areas that need growth. If you are interested in learning more about Full-Stack Observability or if you have questions, click here.
Stay tuned for the final part of our Full-Stack Observability series, where we will cover Xigent’s approach to FSO and what makes it a step above the rest for your company to integrate FSO.
Learn how Xigent helped one of the strongest financial organizations in the United States implement a unified platform that established a single source of truth for its applications and the users’ digital experience.
Be sure to check out Xigent’s FSO web pages, follow us on social media, and stay tuned to read part 5 of Xigent’s Full-Stack Observability blog series to stay up to date as we release content discussing Full-Stack Observability:
Part 1 – Meet Xigent’s Full-Stack Observability Expert: Ed Ferron
Part 2 – What is Full-Stack Observability?
Part 3 – Benefits of Full-Stack Observability
Part 4 – Components of Full-Stack Observability
Part 5 – Journey to Full-Stack Observability
Part 6 – Xigent’s Approach to Full-Stack Observability