Hybrid Cloud | April 26, 2024
By Alex Rassey : Go-To-Market Strategist and Growth Leader
How GNV and Riverbed Solve IT Problems Faster
Information technology teams depend on observability technology to give them insights into their digital infrastructure configurations, helping them to streamline network speed and reliability while simultaneously protecting their assets from network attacks. However, the entire landscape of the interconnectedness of visibility is undergoing massive changes across industries, and Get Network Visibility together with Riverbed Technology are working together to provide up-to-date solutions in the form of unified observability.
Watch the Video: Riverbed App Performance Monitoring
Drawing upon detailed observations of business workloads, technology components, secure exchanges, and system anomalies, unified observability empowers organizations to proactively identify and address issues before they escalate. By combining visibility and control, this approach ensures that IT infrastructure not only meets but exceeds the expectations set by business demands.
Why Implement a Unified Observability Strategy?
According to a recent report by the International Data Corporation (IDC) and Get Network Visibility partner Riverbed Technology, on unified observability, organizations are facing challenges regarding building and operating truly resilient digital infrastructure. Nearly half of the businesses surveyed reported relying on legacy hardware or software systems and that the challenge of mixing on- and off-premise systems and services significantly reduces their overall network visibility and therefore digital service quality.
Pain points include but are not limited to security constraints, high costs for public cloud systems, staff lacking in skills, failure to consistently automize analytics, and a failure to manage multiple data centers and silos simultaneously for clear all-encompassing operations. There was a consensus that most tools available focus on a single or a few parts of network visibility monitoring, which is why a focus needs to be on how to gather all of these streams of data and consolidate them in such a way that they can be easily observed, monitored and analyzed to inform intelligent business decision making. Hence the inception of unified observability not only as a concept but as a valuable service.
Benefits of Unified Observability
Unified observability provides IT teams with a complete view of the entire digital infrastructure, including networks, applications, servers, and security systems. This comprehensive visibility enables teams to quickly identify the root cause of issues by correlating data from different sources.
Further, unified observability tools also offer contextual insights by correlating data across multiple layers and components of the infrastructure. Contextualized information helps IT teams understand the impact of issues on the overall system and prioritize their responses accordingly.
Unified observability relies on shared visibility across teams through a centralized platform accessible to all involved. Teams have access across various functionalities like networking, application development, operations, and security to work together easily as needed.
Applications like shared dashboards, real-time chat, and incident management workflows make inter-operationality and knowledge sharing that much easier. Information sharing, in turn, leads to overall operational efficiency by minimizing redundancies to free up resources for more important tasks.
Understanding Unified Observability: How Does it Work?
In the most simple terms, unified observability works by providing a complete picture of everything happening in a digital system all in one place. It gathers data from different parts of the system, like networks, security, and applications, and brings it together in a single dashboard, like the Riverbed Portal.
This dashboard gives IT teams a clear view of what’s going on, allowing them to quickly spot and fix any problems. By seeing the whole system at once, IT teams can understand how each part affects the others and solve issues faster. So how does it work?
Data Collection
Unified observability starts with collecting data from various sources within the digital infrastructure. This includes metrics, logs, traces, and events generated by networking devices, servers, applications, security systems, and other relevant components. Data collection mechanisms may include agents, sensors, APIs, and integrations with existing monitoring tools, like network packet brokers (NPBs). The goal is to gather a wide range of data points that provide insight into system performance, behavior, and user experience.
At this stage of the process, NPBs play a crucial role in the context of unified observability by acting as intermediaries between network infrastructure and observability tools. These tools are responsible for capturing and analyzing network traffic, which is essential for understanding the performance, security, and behavior of digital systems.
Aggregation
NPBs then aggregate, filter, and distribute network traffic to various monitoring and security tools, ensuring that they receive the relevant data needed for effective analysis. In the context of unified observability, NPBs enhance visibility by intelligently directing traffic to observability tools, allowing organizations to gain comprehensive insights into their network environments.
Visualization
Visualization is essential for presenting data in a meaningful and accessible way. Unified observability platforms offer various visualization tools and techniques to represent data visually, such as dashboards, charts, graphs, and heat maps.
These visualizations provide real-time insights into system performance, health, and trends, allowing IT teams to quickly identify anomalies, outliers, and areas of concern. Visualization also facilitates communication and collaboration across teams by presenting complex information in an intuitive and understandable format.
Watch the Video: Alluvio Platform for Visualization
Analysis
Unified observability platforms leverage advanced analytics techniques, including machine learning, anomaly detection, correlation, and predictive modeling, to uncover patterns, trends, and anomalies within the digital infrastructure.
Analysis enables IT teams to proactively identify and address issues, optimize performance, and improve the overall reliability and efficiency of systems. By continuously analyzing data, organizations can stay ahead of potential problems and make informed decisions to drive business outcomes.
Unified Observability Solution Implementation
Implementing a unified observability solution requires a multifaceted commitment across technical, talent, cultural, and structural fronts. Technically, organizations need to thoroughly evaluate and fund the systems and services supporting observability functions, ensuring they can collect full-spectrum, full-fidelity data crucial for success.
In terms of team members, staff must undergo training not only to operate specific solutions effectively but also to seamlessly integrate multiple tools and datasets. This also involves fostering teamwork and acceptance of shared tools and datasets across the organization for effective collaboration. Structurally, tightening bonds among teams, such as network operations and security operations, along with refining practices like problem resolution and tools such as network and application performance management, is critical.
And of course, harnessing the right data through a network visibility strategy is critical. Prioritizing the completeness, currency, and accuracy of observability data is paramount for enabling in-depth analysis, automated actions, systems integration, and staff efforts necessary for effective management and optimization of the digital infrastructure.
Information technology teams rely on observability technology to gain insights into their digital infrastructure configurations, aiming to streamline network speed and reliability while fortifying their defenses against network attacks. Partners, like Get Network Visibility and Riverbed Technology, are responding with cutting-edge solutions in the form of unified observability solutions.
Unified observability represents a transformative shift in IT management, transcending traditional siloed approaches by providing a holistic view of the entire digital infrastructure, from networking to security to end-user experience.
To implement a successful unified observability solution, organizations must commit to evaluating and funding the necessary systems and services, invest in talent training for seamless integration, foster a culture of collaboration and acceptance of shared tools and datasets, and prioritize the completeness, currency, and accuracy of observability data.
Through these concerted efforts, organizations can navigate the complexities of the digital landscape with confidence, agility, and efficiency, ensuring their readiness to meet the challenges of tomorrow’s IT environment. Contact Get Network Visibility now to get started with your unified observability roadmap.
