While there is no out-of-the-box solution for unified observability, organizations can use a framework to develop a strategy.

• Identify Patterns, Practices, and Protocols: Implementing unified observability starts with treating and designing it as a service that unifies patterns, practices, and protocols, which become the roadmap for implementing a full solution.

• Log Aggregation for Efficient Diagnosis: Effective log aggregation is a cornerstone of a comprehensive monitoring and observability strategy. By determining and monitoring critical metrics through customized dashboards, organizations can streamline the process of identifying root causes of failures.

• CMDB to Capture Relationships: A configuration management database (CMDB) is a critical element in achieving a single pane of glass visibility. Understanding how one asset or configuration item (CI) impacts another depends on the relationships captured within the CMDB, either through a discovery process or using data pump technologies.

• Event Correlation to Accelerate Problem Solving: IT operations teams are measured by their ability to reduce the meantime to resolution (MTTR) for critical issues. The ability to correlate multiple events to a single root cause according to ITIL standards, is essential for achieving quick resolutions. Many enterprise monitoring and application performance management tools are the basis for correlating events that impact a particular service.

• Data and Process Integrations: To achieve a unified view of an environment where data is collected from multiple sources, several points of process and data integration are necessary. The goal is to deduplicate, sanitize, and transform observability data using traditional extract, transform, and load (ETL) technologies to aggregate and consolidate this data from disparate sources.

• Infrastructure Monitoring: An organization may use multiple infrastructure monitoring tools for different use cases. By consolidating these tools into a single dashboard, organizations can save money and IT professionals can focus on developing a common set of skills around the consolidated dashboard rather than relying on localized expertise and knowledge limited to team specific tools.

• Application Monitoring: Application performance management (APM) tools trace transactions within applications to reveal component relationships and processing times. While some tools offer data correlation for related alerts, this is usually limited to what the APM manages. Integrating APM with a CMDB or data analytics platform like Elastic Stack can enhance IT teams’ ability to analyze relationships, monitor trends, and improve application performance and user experience.

• IT/AI Ops to Identify and Analyze Patterns: By integrating tools and features such as IT Service Management, CMDB, APM, infrastructure monitoring, and logging, and by pushing data from these tools into a data warehouse or data lake, organizations can perform intelligent queries and identify patterns. This approach is typically used to analyze trends, user preferences, transaction times, and to determine proactive actions that could help prevent issues before they become critical.

• Automated Remediation using CLIP: Automating repetitive operations center tasks saves time, effort, and money. A self-healing framework, using a closed-loop incident process (CLIP), automates responses to alerts with predefined remediation actions. These actions are codified in automation tools integrated with ticketing systems, CMDB, and logging services, capturing both actions and results.

While many organizations have the skills, tools, and people available to develop and implement a unified observability strategy, they would prefer to have their highly skilled personnel focused more on business outcomes rather than solving IT problems. By outsourcing this work to a specialist with years of experience in helping diverse enterprise clients implement an observability strategy, organizations can avoid the common pitfalls and trial and error often associated with tackling something unfamiliar.

• Establishing a Center of Excellence for Observability: Keyva has helped several Fortune 100 companies define and implement organization-wide observability strategies, including collaborating with cross-functional leadership teams to establish a center of excellence for observability. The center includes employees from multiple IT teams who work together to develop a comprehensive observability strategy that meets IT operations business needs. With guidance from Keyva, the center of excellence can work with the necessary observability components to develop a plan.

• Aligning Organizational Structures: While tools and integrations are important for a unified observability strategy, the IT organization must be aligned to support it. Clearly defined team responsibilities and associated accountabilities are crucial to avoid ambiguity regarding ownership of tools or domains. Without documented ownership, issues are likely to be neglected and root cause analysis turnaround times can increase significantly.

• Consolidating Tools: Most organizations today have more tools than necessary, often exceeding their needs by 150%. This presents opportunities to consolidate tools based on functionality, user teams, or cost, leading to greater efficiency and cost savings.

• Support for Implementation: Keyva provides guidance for developing a unified observability strategy and assists with complex tactical implementations. Our engineering team has implemented unified observability in several large-scale environments using agile methodologies to address unknowns, uncertainties, and the need for flexibility as the project evolves.

• Training and Knowledge Transfer: Every Keyva engagement includes a comprehensive training plan to ensure IT teams can continue the work after the Keyva engagement ends. Our goal is to ensure that your teams know what Keyva did, why we did it, and how we did it.

• Security and Governance: Keyva integrates security into all engineering activities as a fundamental quality of every IT output. Depending on the industry, we typically have a dedicated security team responsible for ensuring IT teams adhere to secure governance and practices.