IT IS TIME TO SHIFT LEFT, OR BE LEFT BEHIND

Empowering employees to perform the tasks of seasoned IT experts can allow organisations to prioritise strategic business initiatives by freeing up their time.

This is not an easy time for those in the technology sector across the world. While economic challenges have led to a major fall in investment, some areas like observability are still ripe for growth. A recent IDC survey indicates that 50% of respondents plan to boost their observability budgets over the next few years.

But why is this? It comes down to being able to ‘Shift Left’, empowering all staff to do the job of more experienced IT experts and freeing up their time so they can focus on strategic business initiatives that can be facilitated and improved by observability. Shift Left is all about early and frequent testing during the development process, which helps to avoid problems later. The success of the concept means that it has spread from DevOps to NetOps and Service Desks, where the approach is now widely used.

Shift Left has generally been used for generating better performance, reliability, and security, scaling up, and boosting the capabilities of the software. But there is plenty more that it can do for NetOps to help with productivity and performance, leading to an improved culture and happier customers. With today’s IT environments becoming increasingly complex, Shift Left can also help companies to safely manage and protect their growing amounts of data.

Unified observability can facilitate effective Shift Left by moving the focus of IT teams from basic, routine tasks to strategic projects such as predictive modelling or improvements to infrastructure and enabling better network performance.

Maximising Benefits

Many enterprises rely on highly skilled IT professionals to tackle complex technological issues. However, as older workers retire and younger generations lack the required skills. The problem is further exacerbated by the growing tech infrastructure, which leads to an increasing number of incidents or system faults. Consequently, experts are stretched thin trying to keep the tech running, leaving little time for strategic initiatives that could benefit the company.

The good news is that observability platforms offer a Shift Left solution by codifying experts’ experience and domain knowledge within automated runbooks. The approach makes it easy to retain key expertise by enabling senior leaders to input their knowledge of problems and solutions into customised workflows. With these runbooks in place, companies can resolve issues more quickly, reducing pressure on experts and providing junior IT staff with opportunities to learn and grow within their roles.

Reducing Alert Fatigue

IT personnel are often inundated with innumerable alerts making monitoring a tough task, leading many to turn them off and wait for a problem to arise. Also, most alerts offer scant information about the issue’s location, cause, or resolution. This creates an overwhelming flood of noise, making it difficult to identify and prioritise critical events.

Observability platforms use artificial intelligence or AI and machine learning or ML to correlate issues affecting the business. Pre-built runbooks perform automated, lowcode investigations, collecting evidence, contextualising events, and prioritising responses. By automating issue identification, junior and senior IT staff can respond quickly, freeing them up to focus on value-adding tasks.

Observability In Practice

Enterprises have long valued traditional monitoring tools, and with good reason, but the truth is that their abilities are limited. They rely upon metrics based on preconceived ideas of potential issues. By contrast, with observability, IT staff can explore unknown or previously unseen events, proactively seeking out ways of safeguarding their infrastructure.

Observability also facilitates the collation of data from separate tools and its analysis with AI and ML to provide further context. By merging monitoring, visibility, and automation, observability can effectively examine the system’s output to establish its status and identify actionable insight.

With unified observability in place, enterprises receive fullfidelity data across the enterprise on transactions, packets, and workflows. This helps improve

Key Takeaways

l Shift Left is about empowering all staff to do the job of more experienced IT experts so they can focus on strategic business initiatives.

l Observability can help NetOps with productivity, performance, and data management.

l Observability platforms offer a Shift Left solution by codifying experts’ experience and domain knowledge within automated runbooks.

l Observability reduces alert fatigue, allows for proactivity, and facilitates the collation of data from separate tools.

the mean time to resolution, MTTR and first-level resolution rates by providing one-click investigations into a client device, network, or backend component problems to identify the source of delays. In addition, it can identify likely causes and support resolutions by analysing the common characteristics of users experiencing the same issues. Typically, organisations using observability have 15% fewer service desk tickets and reduced MTTR by 24%.

Automation Is Critical

IT environments are only going to continue to grow in size and complexity. Currently, they cover anything from on-premises data centres, multiple clouds, and mobile and remote devices, to the increasing number of edge locations and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. But the teams that service these environments are not matching their growth. Intelligent automation is the only way to feasibly address these problems. With observability platforms, enterprises gain advanced automation abilities of AI and ML. These technologies reduce the time taken to pinpoint and correct problems by compiling information from a range of sources enterprisewide, correlating issues, and determining likely causes, drawing on no-code runbooks built using senior IT experts. As such, they are a critical component in winning the battle against the non-stop noise of never-ending monitoring alerts. Ensuring that only critical challenges are handed over for human intervention.

An Effective Shift

Shift Left is a smart and successful approach, making for better security, software quality and business performance. As IT ecosystems continue to evolve and become more complex, bringing unified observability into play alongside Shift Left gives far superior results. Enhanced infrastructure visibility and cutting-edge observability analytics tools reduce MTTR and improve data collection, all the while allowing IT teams to focus on tasks that help meet the business’s strategic objectives, boosting profitability. n