Joe Byrne is Vice President of Technology Strategy and Executive CTO at AppDynamics, a part of Cisco

His primary focus is on working with customers and prospects on APM strategy and helping with digital transformations. He also works closely with Sales, Marketing, Product and Engineering on product strategy. Prior to AppDynamics, Joe held technology leadership roles at Albertsons, EllieMae and Johnson and Johnson.

Over the last two years, technologists have come under unprecedented pressure to embrace digital transformation and innovation at record speeds.

In the AppDynamics research, 86% of technologists reported greater visibility across their IT stack over the last 12 months when implementing full-stack observability

As a consequence, consistent availability and performance of the applications and digital services that customers and end users rely upon has never been more important. But at the same time, this has never been harder to achieve. To facilitate rapid innovation many technology leaders turbo-charged their move to the cloud and now preside over increasingly complex IT environments and sprawling cloud infrastructure.

Now the clock is ticking for IT teams to get control over their IT environments and achieve the level of visibility and insight needed to manage the next wave of digital change.

Full-stack observability is quickly emerging as a technology that can help solve some of these challenging and complex issues. The latest report from AppDynamics, The Journey to Observability, reveals a surge of organizations making serious moves to improve visibility within their IT environment with as many as 90% of organizations planning to be somewhere along the journey to full-stack observability during 2022.The next 12 months will be pivotal for many in this journey. Here we explore three important reasons why full-stack observability should be in every IT team’s toolkit as they prepare for the next wave of innovation.

It’s no secret that there has been a massive increase in complexity for IT departments in the last few years as the world shifted online. The result is they were left to manage increasingly fragmented IT estates as they rushed to keep application and digital experiences running.

Technologists have been overwhelmed by data noise and have not had the tools readily available to identify which issues really matter and where to focus their efforts. But as we enter a new phase where immediate reactive response to the pandemic has evolved to proactive planning for the future, technologists need to find a way to tame complexity and manage data noise. Full-stack observability is enabling them to be more strategic in their approach.

This technology provides users with unified, real-time visibility into availability and performance up and down the IT stack for compute, storage, network and public internet, from the customer-facing application all the way into the back end. It enables IT teams to quickly and easily identify anomalies, understand dependencies and fix issues before they affect customers.

And the results are clear to see. Organizations that have already started the move to a full-stack observability approach are seeing results and clear return on investment (ROI).

When we look more deeply at the specific benefits that early adopters of full-stack observability are seeing, it’s clear that ROI and reduction in costs are achieved in a number of ways.

The pandemic accelerated the expansion of the digital economy at a rate that was previously unthinkable

Half of IT teams say that a full-stack observability approach has led to improved productivity and 46% have reduced operational costs in the IT department as they now need to spend less time identifying anomalies and understanding dependencies in order to perform fixes. Others say they can also deploy team members to more strategic work that can better impact the business. 43% explain that they have seen better collaboration between IT operations, development and networking teams as they now have a single source of truth for data. No more working in silos with independent, disconnected monitoring tools.