How Partners Can Win with Full-Stack Observability

By Jeff McCullough

Jeff McCullough

Businesses are fueled by data. Companies rely on it to make informed decisions, personalize services for users and customers, and connect disparate global teams. Because data is so vital, it’s often a company’s most valuable asset.

However, data isn’t helpful unless it’s in the hands of the right people at the right time. This is why some companies deploy a small army of monitoring tools to keep the data flowing. With monitoring, data pros receive alerts – a massive number of them – when something has changed or gone wrong.

When breakdowns occur or bugs develop, understanding where the fault lies can be a job all its own. Vast amounts of time pass as data pros beat the underbrush searching for a solution. Lucky organizations have someone on hand with a spooky, near-psychic connection to the database. But if this person is on vacation or leaves the company, everyone is back to square one.

And even when nothing’s wrong, there’s still the problem of endless routine alerts. Unfortunately, there are often so many alerts the “alert fatigue” it creates becomes endemic.

Customers ask our partners: Isn’t there a better way?

End-To-End Oversight

Traditional monitoring relies on dashboards to assess telemetry data against manual or basic statistically relevant thresholds. Usually, the monitoring is directed at a specific network, cloud or infrastructure, while the tools display which components of interest are up, which ones are down, and which ones have changed.

Modern systems are multicloud or hybrid and must be connected across computer, application and database domains. As a result, they generate tremendous amounts of telemetry data the traditional monitoring mechanism can’t manage effectively. Additionally, these tools don’t always provide cross-domain correlation, service delivery insight, operational dependencies or predictability.

Full-Stack Observability

Instead of struggling with an array of monitoring tools, there’s a ready answer for your clients: Yes, there’s a better way. It’s called full-stack observability.

Full-stack observability gives your clients end-to-end oversight of service delivery and component dependencies to better anticipate and detect problems before they occur.

With full-stack observability, your clients can:

Full-stack observability continuously analyzes conditions affecting user experience and performance to predict element problems, service levels and needed capacity changes. Full-stack observability also provides visualization and insights, deep analytics, greater workflow efficiencies, automation and closed-loop management.

In effect, your clients can work smarter, not harder. Organizations no longer need to depend on one staff member who always has a fix. Instead, full-stack observability helps IT Ops, DevOps and security organizations to achieve consistent, optimized and predictable business service delivery with improved digital experience and IT productivity.

Organizations can then make faster decisions because they receive service and component-level visualizations, insights and intelligence. They can manage the services supporting customers and employees and meet SLAs as they conduct problem resolution, configuration, reporting and planning tasks.

With full-stack observability, IT organizations can stop being reactive and focus on higher-level processes while gaining opportunities to become more productive. As a result, the entire IT organization becomes more efficient at problem resolution, configuration, reporting and planning tasks.

Jeff McCullough is vice president of worldwide partner sales at SolarWinds, where he brings over 20 years of experience in IT channel sales and senior management, with a focus on enterprise sales, strategic alliances and business development. He most recently served as vice president with Park Place Technologies, leading the launch of the company’s new channel program, and previously worked at NetApp, Quest Software and HP. McCullough holds a bachelor’s degree from Marquette University and is a graduate of executive education at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Harvard Business School. You may follow him on LinkedIn or @solarwinds on Twitter.