Across all sectors, board level executives have recognised that the ability to deliver innovative and seamless digital experiences at all times is now absolutely critical.

They know that they simply can’t afford any slip ups when it comes to digital experience - just the smallest disruption to their digital services can lead to lost customers, declining revenues and a tarnished reputation. And just in case they needed it, the regular reports of brands suffering a high profile outage act as a constant reminder to senior leaders of what can happen when technology doesn’t perform.

The latest report from AppDynamics, The Journey to Observability, really emphasises this shift in thinking. It reveals that 93% of technologists are now getting the support, budget and resources they need from business stakeholders in order to implement their full-stack observability plans.

Full-stack observability provides technologists with unified, real-time visibility into IT availability and performance up and down the stack for compute, storage, network and public internet, from the customer-facing application to deep down in the back-end. This enables technologists to quickly and easily identify anomalies, understand dependencies and fix issues before they impact the end user.

Technologists have long recognised the need to build on their existing monitoring solutions in order to get greater visibility across their IT estate, particularly as their organisations ramp up the use of microservices, container and serverless environments.

However, as with any emerging new technology, many had previously struggled to convince business leaders of this need for improved visibility and to secure the necessary support and budget to implement full-stack observability solutions.

You only need to go back 18 months and many IT leaders were really having to fight for the resources to implement tools to monitor performance in new cloud environments. Some were meeting considerable resistance, with questions being raised about business need and return on investment.

Evidently, this changed in 2021, with business stakeholders recognising that full-stack observability is critical to delivering the brilliant, seamless digital experiences customers now demand. 88% of technologists report that appetite for full-stack observability within their organisation increased last year and 90% state that their organisations now regard the transition to full-stack observability as a priority.

Early benefits proving the value of full-stack observability to business leaders

Where organisations have progressed with their full-stack observability plans, business leaders have been able to see immediate, tangible results. These include improved productivity within the IT department, reduced operational costs due to teams having to spend less time reacting to performance issues, and improved collaboration across the business.

Perhaps most significantly, business leaders are starting to feel the impact of having their technologists focused on key strategic priorities, such as digital transformation and enhanced customer experience, rather than the constant firefighting of the past two years.

They know what a huge difference it can make to their organisation if they can get their most innovative brains concentrating on those innovation-driven projects that can really shape the future of a business and a market.

And this, more than anything else, is why business leaders are now urging technologists to accelerate their plans for full-stack observability during 2022.

Technologists confident about building on progress to date

It’s important to recognise that, for all of their achievements over the past 12 months, most businesses are still at the very earliest stages of their journey to full-stack observability.

The majority of IT departments are either still relying on multiple, disconnected tools to monitor IT availability and performance across the IT stack; or else they do have a more unified monitoring strategy but still have little visibility into the impact of performance issues and are unable to link these to business KPIs in real-time.

The deployment of full-stack observability is a multi-stage journey that brings visibility and insights across the entire IT stack.

Many technologists build this into their internal strategy to reduce legacy tools and deliver interoperable solutions which enable teams to focus on business outcomes as compared to the traditional siloed method.

Through these efforts, technologists are bringing together more of their existing monitoring solutions and add new solutions to generate greater visibility across all IT environments, growing benefits exponentially.

The research indicates a widespread understanding of this need for a sustained and strategic approach to full-stack observability amongst technologists, and a strong determination to stay the course to achieve their goals.

Technologists are ready to overcome the challenges ahead and to drive through the technical, cultural and structural changes required along the way.

But whereas 12 months ago, the desire for full-stack observability was mostly being driven by fear and necessity - what will happen if we don’t get full visibility into the IT stack? - technologists are now being motivated by the end prize.

They feel genuinely excited about the benefits that full-stack observability can bring to their organisation from both an IT and business performance perspective. In fact, 85% believe that the shift to full-stack observability will be transformational for their business.

Having made such good progress over the last year, technologists are feeling optimistic about what they can achieve in 2022. They know that the next 12 months will be crucial in their journey to full-stack observability - they need to build on this current momentum and continue to build on their existing monitoring capabilities.

But technologists are right to feel confident about hitting their goals in 2022. They’ve already made remarkable progress, they’ve identified areas for improvement and, most of all, they now have the full backing of business leaders, with the resources and support required to take huge strides forward.