Accelerated digitalization is steering operations teams towards new observability stacks to oversee an increasingly diverse and distributed IT portfolio, according to GlobalData. The leading data and analytics company notes that companies are overwhelmed with the move from monolithic apps to microservices where various service components within a single app must be secured and managed.

According to the latest report by GlobalData, Integrated Observability Systems Help Make Sense of Distributed IT Portfolios, new monitoring tools are emerging to help developers collaborate under DevOps models and gain automated visibility into the impact of modern coding on underlying systems.

Charlotte Dunlap, Principal Analyst at GlobalData, comments: “Not only will these monitoring tools shorten lengthy feedback cycles, but they will also enhance the quality of apps moving through the pipeline, as well as help companies remain competitive and agile.”

Advancements shining the spotlight onto observability include integrated analytics with monitoring solutions; broad industry acceptance of interoperability OSS technology, such as OpenTelemetry; and innovative disruptors of the traditional monitoring space.

Dunlap adds: “Early thought leaders span from modern APM and cloud platforms providers aiming to enhance their core hybrid and multi-cloud offerings (IBM Instana, Red Hat Insights/Ansible, and Oracle Cloud Observability) to power-house startups set to disrupt the traditional monitoring space (Honeycomb, Lightstep, and Chronosphere).

“The number of drivers and enablers of observability include a change from data-based to event-based architectures and increased focus on infrastructure as code. This supports an IT model that lets developers play a greater role in application lifecycle management – testing and applying security earlier in the software development process. The move towards emerging observability is helping it become a relevant part of the cloud’s value chain and important technology to watch.”

Over the next six to 12 months, the observability market will evolve to include more comprehensive solutions that provide application-level observability data alongside systems-level data- delivered through pre-set parameters. Integrated observability will support event streaming to detect anomalies and instantaneously highlight areas of concern through ML by measuring baseline thresholds and learning over time via modeling when things are not consistent.

Dunlap concludes: “The future of observability is around ML-powered predictive and prescriptive analytics to enable proactive responses that prevent incidents.”