How to increase revenue and improve user application experiences with full-stack observability

Application performance is a critical contributor to user experience and consequently the reputation and success of businesses today. While traditional monitoring tools are ill-equipped to monitor the performance of applications running in increasingly complex environments, full-stack observability can help businesses improve performance levels to deliver quality user experiences. 

As analyst firm IDC noted in the report Full Stack Observability: Expanding the Digital Experience and Impact with Advanced Business Context, business executives are focusing on expanding customer and partner engagement models, accelerating innovation, improving worker productivity and improving the digital experience for all.

As a result, “applications and supporting network, compute and cloud infrastructure have become the foundation for profitable revenue growth, worker and customer success, and competitive advantage.” This is borne out by the success of mobile gaming and streaming applications–to cite just two consumer application categories–and, in the workplace, cloud-based applications such as Microsoft 365 and Salesforce.    

Application performance is more important than ever

For many businesses today, applications represent the brand internally and externally–making flawless application experience crucial.  With applications increasingly key to workplace productivity and performance, and customer engagement, loyalty and service, more than four-fifths (84%) of respondents to a Cisco AppDynamics survey reported that maintaining business application performance was more important than ever. 

Yet this is becoming increasingly difficult. Another leading analyst firm, Gartner, pointed out in its report Innovation Insight for Observability that the monitoring tools used to track the performance of modern infrastructure, networks and applications that support business processes are failing to adapt to the increasing volatility of these architectures.

“Static dashboards with human-generated thresholds do not scale to these modern environments and are inflexible in assisting the resolution of unforeseen events,” Gartner stated. “Using these tools, the business is unable to determine the state of its applications with a high degree of certainty and understand how their services impact key performance indicators and customers’ digital experience.”. 

Increasing complexity presenting challenges

The increasing complexity of applications themselves, the cloud architectures in which they run, and the decentralised services on which they are based is creating a range of challenges for businesses.  For example, Cisco pointed out that 75% of technologists face more complexity and wrestle with overwhelming data noise, while 85% are challenged to cut through data volumes to identify performance issue root causes.

Just one minor problem in the network, infrastructure, security, storage or web services, can flow into and degrade the application experience, prompting customers to move elsewhere.      

Full stack observability core to sustainable transformation and innovation

For businesses with complex application infrastructure, deploying the right tools to identify and remedy performance issues is crucial. According to Cisco, with a solution that delivers full-stack observability, businesses can gain visibility across the application stack, derive insights and take action tied to business context.

Full-stack observability enables businesses to monitor the performance of traditional and hybrid applications that may be monolithic, hosted and leverage traditional infrastructure and hybrid cloud, the vendor said. 

They can, according to Cisco, also monitor cloud-native applications that are microservices-based, distributed and leverage public or private cloud technologies. A fully-featured solution will also deliver insights into application experiences, underlying dependencies and business impacts. 

Businesses can assure the performance of managed and unmanaged, or third party, application services and APIs, including internet and cloud network performance, Cisco added. Furthermore, they can reduce costs by paying only for what is needed in the public cloud and increasing utilisation of on-premises assets. In addition, they can improve and assure application performance by removing guesswork from resource allocation for workloads on-premises and in public cloud.

An urgent need to upgrade security capabilities

Security solutions and processes are more crucial than ever in protecting modern infrastructure and applications–as well as other elements of the technology stack. The need for businesses to upgrade their security capabilities is clear and urgent. The Cisco Cybersecurity Readiness Index released in March 2023 reveals that just 11% of organisations in Australia have a ‘mature’ readiness level to tackle the cybersecurity risks of a hybrid world, in which individuals operate from multiple devices in multiple locations, connecting to multiple networks. More than nine in 10 (92%) of respondents to the Index in Australia expected a cybersecurity incident to disrupt their businesses within the next 12 to 24 months.

The report notes that traditional perimeter-based security models are ill-equipped to cope with the hybrid model, in which data can be spread across services, devices, applications and users. 

On the application front, the Cisco Cybersecurity Readiness Index points out that shifting to modern, distributed applications can increase an organisation’s attack surface. Cisco AppDynamics research reveals 78% of IT professionals globally feel that their organization is vulnerable to a multi-stage security attack that would affect the full application stack over the next 12 months.    

“While 97% of respondents have rolled out application protection solutions, most are not yet ready to meet the challenges ahead,” the report stated.

Full-stack observability solutions can help address the application security challenge by enabling businesses to actively identify and block vulnerabilities in application run-times in production. 

For businesses looking to thrive in today’s cloud and application-centric world, full stack observability means they can deliver high quality experiences to workers and customers