by Pradeep Seshadri, Head of Solutions Consulting, India, New Relic
As the global economic downturn continues to affect businesses, budget cuts are real. Although Indian businesses are better insulated from the effects of the overall macroeconomic climate, 93% of organisations have already cut operational costs or are planning to do so over the next 12 months.
Budget cuts often involve digital businesses generating reports on their infrastructure spend with details on major services that run the business. Resources tagged in the cloud are often run through billing tools offered by major cloud providers that are meant to help them optimise their spend. However other non-negotiable tools such as observability platforms, can be a little trickier to determine cost-effectiveness and ROI.
Many legacy observability tools offer only high-level, point-in-time assessment of your data usage without the flexibility to break it down by service or team, or provide insights and analysis into trends over time. Businesses may consider open source solutions as an alternative but the problem of dwelling in silos persists. As a consequence, businesses overbuy/ or underbuy, struggle with vendor lock-ins and fall into billing traps. Businesses keen on investing smartly need to be extremely cautious while choosing the right observability solution for their needs to avoid these pitfalls, and they can begin by asking the right questions.
Does the solution offer business value and quantified benefits?
Observability solutions can not deliver maximum ROI if they can’t provide real business outcomes across the three pillars: people, processes, and technology. The right solutions eliminate organisational silos and with this visibility, businesses can do a lot more to improve the health of their budget.
For example, one of India’s largest e-grocery platforms relies on their tech stack to function efficiently to support operations, but like any business, costs can quickly mount if left unchecked. By adopting an all-in-one observability platform, the company now has the capacity to identify the slowest APIs and database queries that are impacting the performance of its systems. They can optimise the database, and identify the cost centres for the majority of applications, enabling them to be reviewed for ROI. With the right observability platform, this business slashed infrastructure costs by 35%, improved mean-time-to-recovery (MTTR) by 70-80%, and achieved 20% month-on-month growth.
Ultimately, the observability platform needs to improve productivity by freeing up existing teams to work on other priorities, enhance MTTR for customer-facing apps to reduce revenue loss, and allow real-time data management and analysis from a business perspective to deliver a great customer experience.
Does the solution help engineering teams perform better?
Engineers are tasked with delivering highly functional and robust software. The rate of innovation requires development teams to consistently work at high velocity so they develop, test, and deploy new apps quickly to keep up with customer demand.
They also need high levels of visibility at every stage of the software development life cycle but can get bogged down by silos and blind spots due to the sheer number of point-tools in use. This makes troubleshooting a Herculean task as engineers are spending valuable time looking for problems that are increasingly hard to identify and isolate.
Businesses need to ask themselves if the solutions they want to invest in break down silos and improve productivity so engineers aren’t bogged down with time consuming troubleshooting. The solution must also identify issues quickly and proactively, and improve the overall software development process. Ultimately, the payoff is significant: the average team productivity of businesses using an all-in-one observability solution increased by 43%, which translated into an average annual savings of $1.3M for each organisation.
Does the solution help meet business KPIs?
Businesses must be able to rely on the solution for better management of applications and systems to move products and services to market more expeditiously, and serve their customers better.
For example, an all-in-one observability platform will help businesses identify in real time how successful their customers were in logging into their websites, or how successful they were with specific business transactions — these valuable insights can help them strategise and make necessary changes to improve their KPIs.
The business case for observability is quite simple. What are the business and customer risks for not knowing how critical products and digital services are performing? What is the impact on businesses and customer experience if they fail? While these questions are crucial starting points for knowing why it’s important to invest in observability, it’s also important to understand whether the specific observability platform in question has quantifiable insights that help businesses become agile and grow.
An all-in-one observability platform is a core capability for every IT organisation, and a necessity that can help businesses meet the growing demands of digital transformation, cost optimisation and growth in times of adversity.
