The words “digital transformation” get thrown around a lot these days. It feels like it’s the goal of every enterprise - some have even claimed to achieve it. We’re looking around and… Is the digital transformation in the room with us?
At Liatrio, we believe digital transformation is more than a buzzword; it’s an actionable, ongoing process. Through our dedication to observability and our sponsorship of the 2024 DORA report, we’re not just discussing transformation; we’re facilitating it. We’re committed to turning this abstract goal into a tangible, measurable objective that drives real, sustainable change for enterprises.
What is Enterprise Observability?
Enterprise observability refers to the comprehensive capability of an organization to monitor, understand, and manage the performance and health of its complex software systems across various departments and platforms. It encompasses the integration and analysis of metrics, logs, and traces to provide real-time insights into system operations, enabling proactive identification and resolution of issues. This holistic approach ensures that enterprises can maintain optimal functionality, reliability, and efficiency in their software delivery processes, ultimately driving better business outcomes and enhancing customer satisfaction.
What is the DORA Report?
Google’s DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) report is a fact-based report regarding performance in software delivery and DevOps practices in different industries. Many call this the gold standard paper in understanding the state of DevOps and its effects on business outcomes. This report provides insight into key measures that include deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and mean time to restore, providing a benchmark for organizations as they look to improve their software delivery processes.
The DORA report also assesses how the role of evolving technologies, such as AI and platform engineering methodologies, and the importance of the developer experience provide concrete recommendations and best practices. The DORA report uses comprehensive studies and empirical data to provide enterprises with knowledge in support of driving continuous improvement, enhancing operational efficiency, and providing a competitive edge in today’s digital landscape.
The Business Value of Observability
Speed Up Delivery and Innovation
Observability is one of the key drivers of business agility and innovation. By offering real-time insights into the performance and health of the systems, development teams can realize and fix issues quickly. This leads to a quick development cycle where developers can iterate fast and release more often. Companies that use observability can change at the pace of the market and release new features and products, keeping them not only ahead of the competition but also enabling them to meet new customer demands effectively.
Enhanced Quality and Reliability
Software that isn’t high quality and reliable holds enterprises back. Observability enhances these by enabling continuous monitoring and analysis of system performance. By detecting anomalies and potential failures early, observability tools help maintain system stability and reduce the frequency of service disruptions. This proactive approach ensures that software remains robust, minimizing downtime and improving user satisfaction.
Better Customer Experience
Customer experience is vital for market retention and expansion. To make sure software continues to perform at optimal levels under varying conditions, observability is critical. Teams can identify and solve bottlenecks in performance quickly by observing key performance indicators and user-system interactions. This way, the end user can derive a smoother, faster, and more reliable experience, ensuring customer loyalty and advocacy. Enterprises that prioritize observability can meet and outcompete customer expectations.
Risk Mitigation and Compliance
Managing regulatory requirements and risks in today’s enterprise can be a challenge. With visibility into systems’ functioning and security posture, observability provides critical insights. It’s essentially an audit trail for compliance requirements and to prove following the regulations, but logs and traces go further. Observability further enables the timely detection and resolution of security issues, reducing the risk of data breaches and ensuring the security of sensitive information. Enterprises build more resilience to potential threats through observability integrated within their operations, and they are able to consistently achieve regulatory compliance.
Cost Efficiency and Resource Optimization
Efficient resource management lies at the heart of optimizing investments in IT and operational expenditures. All these aspects are enabled by identifying underused resources that result in cost efficiency and optimization of system performance. The granularity of detail in resource consumption and operational efficiencies offered by observability tools enables organizations to allocate resources judiciously. Not only does this minimize operational costs, but it also increases overall system efficiency and sustainability. Enterprises that maximize their investments in observability allow for long-term growth and scalability.
Observability in AI, Platform Engineering, and Developer Experience
Artificial Intelligence (AI), platform engineering, and developer experience are three main topics the 2024 DORA report will cover. Let’s break down what that looks like in terms of observability for each:
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence has been changing organizational workflows, driving productivity and operational efficiency. Enterprises can optimally deploy new AI technologies to enhance performance and enable more effective innovation, but only if there is a great level of detail in the understanding of how they function and how they’re measured. Observability ensures that AI systems are visible to the level required for dependable and accurate performance, boosting overall efficiency and innovation.
- Time to Solve a Problem - Measure the duration it takes for AI to provide a solution to a given problem. This metric helps assess the efficiency and effectiveness of AI in delivering timely solutions. Compare the time taken by AI to solve problems with traditional methods to evaluate improvements in problem-solving speed.
- Time to Write Tests - Calculate the time it takes for AI-driven tools to generate test cases. This metric highlights the contribution of AI in streamlining the testing process, reducing manual effort, and accelerating test creation. Assessing this metric helps in understanding how AI impacts the overall testing efficiency and quality assurance processes.
- Time to Write Code - Measure the amount of time AI tools take to write and suggest code snippets or complete coding tasks. This metric provides insights into how AI enhances coding productivity and assists developers in speeding up the development process. By comparing AI-assisted coding times with traditional coding methods, organizations can evaluate the productivity gains brought by AI integration.
Platform Engineering
Insights on platform engineering from the DORA report offer views about best practices that will streamline development processes and improve software delivery performance. Here, observability plays a significant role in those best practices by providing a platform performance view, easy bottleneck identification, and smooth operation. This effectively means platform engineers can continuously fine-tune their systems for better reliability while reducing development cycles.
Metrics we use to measure Platform Engineering:
- Adoption Rate - The rate at which product teams adopt a platform component. Can be calculated per component as between (T0 and Tn) number of adoptions / total teams.
- InnerSourcing Contributions - A monotonic count of code contributions merged into the trunk of any given platform components from contributors outside of the platform team.
- Platform Experience Survey - NPS Survey like results where the survey is deployed while users are in the context of using your platform. The survey questions are focused specifically on the platform. For example, if your platform is CI/CD, issue a brief survey post git push, while the user is in context, waiting on a build.
- Platform Resiliency - Leverage the key tenets of observability to achieve SLI’s and SLO’s specific to your platform. Simply put, this is platform uptime.
Developer Experience
An organization that creates a positive and constructive work environment for developers maximizes innovation, accelerates delivery cycles, and ultimately delights the customer. This is because observability gives developers the tools and insights into fishing out issues rapidly, understanding system behavior, and optimizing workflows. It increases not only the morale of developers but also ensures high-quality software and improved delivery timelines.
Using this data from the DORA report, organizations can arm themselves with actionable insights that drive continuous improvements and secure competitive edge. observability plays an instrumental role in the journey of obtaining visibility and insight to negotiate modern software systems’ complexities and ensure sustained success.
Metrics we use to measure Developer Experience:
- Onboarding Experience - Measure the overall onboarding time from gaining hardware to receiving the proper access to be productive. How does your organization's onboarding experience compare to other organizations?
- Mean Time to First Commit In Production - Calculate the delta between new hire start date to the timestamp of the first commit deployed to Production.
- Time In Context/Flow - Measure the amount of time spent doing development work vs in meetings & ceremonies -Discoverability of Quality Documentation - How easy is it to find materials you need to do your job. Use of Well-Known, “Googleable” Technologies - Using well-known or open source technologies over home-grown, bespoke solutions with high learning curves
Our Commitment to Observability
Liatrio is proud to sponsor the 2024 DORA report. We have a deep commitment to driving excellence in software delivery through observability, and the DORA reports are well known for their strict analysis and valuable insights into DevOps practices and software delivery performance.
Aligning ourselves with the principles and findings of DORA allows us to assert our commitments toward data-driven decision-making, performance and reliability, best practices, and strong organizational culture. This partnership will enable us to contribute towards shared knowledge and the advancement of the industry in support of organizations along their journey to optimal software delivery.
Conclusion
Observability is not purely a technical tool but also a strategic asset that drives faster delivery, quality improvement, and reduced software failure rates. This results in improved user experience, reduction of risk, and efficient resource use within software delivery. As organizations continue their pursuit of modern software development and the resultant delivery complexities, observability has now become vital in ensuring operational excellence and eventual business success.
Your participation in the DORA survey helps to provide insights from diverse perspectives, enhancing everyone’s understanding of the practices and capabilities that drive technology performance. The survey ends June 30, so don’t wait! Take it here.
At Liatrio, we believe in helping organizations unlock the full potential of observability. It is this promise that, along with the insights from the 2024 DORA Report, will be a solid contribution to making a future with software systems that are functional, reliable, and resilient. Stay tuned for more insights and updates as we explore the power of observability in the enterprise.
