Commissioned: The saying that the management of what cannot be measured is impossible continues to spark debates. Some leaders rely on analytics to enhance business processes and results. For these individuals, emulating the principles of Moneyball is the favored approach for implementation.
On the other hand, some put their trust in intuition, depending on traditional human judgment to guide their decisions.
Regardless of which category IT leaders find themselves in – straddling both sides is trendy nowadays – the importance of analyzing the vast amount of data produced by your IT infrastructure for sustaining efficient operations is becoming increasingly evident.
Data Analysis in a Multi-Cloud Environment
Analyzing data may seem straightforward, given the array of tools available for this purpose. However, there is no single tool that can comprehensively measure all activities within your data center. Furthermore, a significant portion of data is now being generated outside the confines of your data center.
The expanding complexity of multi-cloud environments, with applications operating across public and private clouds, on-premises, colocation facilities, and edge locations, has made it challenging to assess system performance. Data is being generated in various clouds, regions, and sources, including servers, storage devices, and networking equipment.
In addition to the data produced by numerous applications running in corporate data centers and those hosted by third parties, the volumes of data are not only soaring but also becoming more difficult to manage. According to IDC research, data is projected to exceed 221,000 exabytes and experience a compound annual growth rate of 21 percent by 2026.
It’s worth noting that these impressive statistics were revealed before the emergence of generative AI (GenAI) shook the world last year, expanding the realms of unstructured data such as text, video, audio, and software code across organizations globally. Unstructured data is anticipated to contribute to over 90 percent of the data generated annually, as per the IDC report. Again, this was before GenAI became a significant trend in 2023.
A Unified Approach to Comprehensive Measurement
If only there existed an application capable of assessing the performance of such diverse systems and their data. The next best alternative? Observability, a technique for deducing the internal states of infrastructure and applications based on their outputs. Observability extends and incorporates traditional monitoring systems to assist IT in identifying the root causes of issues by intelligently surfacing anomalies down to the endpoint.
In understanding the activities within your IT infrastructure, observability has never been more crucial, especially with the proliferation of AI technologies – particularly GenAI. Like many AI tools, GenAI learns from the data it receives, underscoring the criticality of trusting the data.
Companies implementing LLMs or SLMs might leverage proprietary data to enhance the effectiveness of their solutions while aiming to prevent data loss and leakage. This underscores the significance of observability, which offers a comprehensive view of the health of IT systems.
Observability stacks typically comprise monitoring tools that continuously monitor system metrics, logs, traces, and events to identify bottlenecks across infrastructure and applications. Data collection tools, such as sensors, software agents, and other instruments, track telemetry data.
Modern observability stacks harness AIOps, where organizations employ AI and machine learning techniques to analyze and interpret system data. For instance, advanced ML algorithms can identify anomalies and autonomously address issues or escalate them to human IT personnel as needed.
Furthermore, observability and AIOps are assuming greater importance with the rise of GenAI services, which operate as black boxes. Essentially, no one comprehends the internal workings of these services or how they produce their outputs.
Ideally, your AIOps tools will safeguard your GenAI and other AI technologies, providing enhanced peace of mind.
The Importance of Monitoring Observability
Automation often implies a set-it-and-forget-it approach to IT systems, but it’s imperative to dispel this notion. Even the monitoring process requires human oversight.
For instance, organizations that fail to capture data across all layers of their infrastructure or applications may suffer from blind spots, rendering them vulnerable to system failures and downtime.
Moreover, the lack of contextualization or correlation of data across different systems can lead to misinterpretations and complicate the task of pinpointing the root causes of incidents, thereby impacting system reliability.
Lastly, it’s not uncommon for thousands of incidents to be buried within billions of data points generated daily by an enterprise. IT departments should prioritize alerts based on their business impact. Nevertheless, without the capability to analyze this data in real-time, generating actionable insights becomes impossible.
In today’s digital landscape, organizations cannot afford to endure downtime. Assessing system health and resolving issues before they degrade the performance of IT infrastructure and applications is paramount.
It’s impossible to monitor everything. A partner can assist.
With numerous business initiatives demanding IT resources, monitoring internal systems can be challenging for IT teams. Trusted partners can aid in observing IT health.
Dell Technologies CloudIQ portfolio proactively monitors Dell hardware, encompassing servers, storage, hyperconverged infrastructure, networking technologies, and Dell APEX multicloud systems. Furthermore, through its acquisition of Moogsoft, Dell is enhancing its AIOps capabilities, supporting a strategy of multicloud operations across on-premises systems, various clouds, and edge devices.
While relying on intuition may work for certain scenarios, when it comes to your IT systems, would you want to adopt that approach? For such a critical endeavor, comprehensive measurement is indispensable in managing your IT systems.
Sponsored by Dell Technologies.
