How Lack of Knowledge Among Teams Impacts Observability

Without a doubt, you’ve heard about the persistent talent gap that has troubled the technology sector in recent years. It’s a problem that isn’t going away, plaguing everyone from engineering teams to IT security pros, and if you work in the industry today you’ve likely experienced it somewhere within your own teams.

Despite major changes in the tech landscape, it is clear that organizations are still having significant difficulty keeping their technical talent in-house.

According to a fall 2022 survey by Deloitte, some 60% of tech leaders believe that recruiting talent is a major challenge. Half of respondents said retaining that talent was a similarly major challenge. Good people remain difficult to find, and keep.

These concerns are further exacerbated by the rapid rate of change across the modern technology spectrum. Innovations such as the cloud, microservices architectures and CI/CD delivery practices have ramped up complexity and placed experienced workers at an even greater premium. To that end, the current talent gap has also levied a major impact on observability practices within many organizations. 

As observability data volumes are skyrocketing, it clearly becomes harder to separate the signal from the noise. When an issue in your cloud applications or infrastructure inevitably arises, how quickly can you hope to investigate and troubleshoot those problems without the right knowledge in place?

Architectures have grown exceedingly complex. While services like Kubernetes have helped with building and orchestrating modern applications, the layers of added abstraction involved make almost every aspect of monitoring and troubleshooting even more difficult. 

This troubling knowledge and talent gap trend for observability was highlighted in the 2024 Observability Pulse survey of over 500 IT professionals globally, and raises the question for how organizations can tackle this issue going forward.

Lack of Knowledge on Teams is Causing Observability Difficulty

Each year, we ask respondents of the Pulse survey about the biggest challenges they face gaining observability into their cloud native environment. In 2023, the top response to this question was “Kubernetes“, microservices, serverless and cloud native architecture” coming in at just under 50%. 

In 2024, a different response to this question earned the top spot: “lack of knowledge among the team,” at 48%. “Data security” was second at 43% and “the total cost of ownership and large volumes of data” was third at 42%. The “Kubernetes” response was tied for 4th at 36%.

There are a few different takeaways from that top response. First, it’s a sign that teams are lacking individuals and manpower to gain the correct observability into their environments. Second, it also shows that even if teams have the requisite number of individuals, they don’t have the right technical acumen to gain and maintain observability.

As a result, organizations must find a way to overcome their current technical and process challenges to engage a practical observability approach that meets the vision for unified, cross-stack visibility and troubleshooting that drives down MTTR and improves user experience. This must be supported by tooling that helps experienced workers cover more ground with less effort, and enables less experienced teams to leverage automation and even AI to close the gap and perform at a higher level than otherwise possible.

The 2024 Observability Pulse survey demonstrates clearly that increasing maturity to best enable available talent while more closely controlling costs will be critical requirements, both today and in the future.

How Logz.io Open 360™ Can Help Overcome Observability Talent Gaps

An observability platform designed for modern, cloud-native use cases can help you overcome talent gaps and provide needed stability when your team needs it.

Providing the targeted automation necessary to better enable your team, regardless of experience level, is precisely how Logz.io has built the Open 360 observability platform and also curated the hands-on support that you receive when you’re one of our customers.

Open 360 can help immediately extend the capabilities of your team in many ways, including:

• Observability IQ. This new capability from Open 360 surpasses traditional dashboard analytics by offering you the option to have an interactive dialogue with your data, lessening the burden on your team. Have you ever looked at a graph and wished it could tell you more? Now that wish has become a reality. Initiate conversations, ask questions, and delve into the specifics behind each data point with this new AI-powered feature.

• Parsing-as-a-service. The process of manually parsing your log and security data once you start using an observability platform can be tedious and cumbersome. With Logz.io, your data could be automatically parsed by our platform, or our Support Team will parse your logs for you at any time of day.

• Alert Recommendations. This feature models actions taken by platform users and then advises subsequent users what to do when faced with similar issues through supervised machine learning, automating a key process that will help your team during challenging situations.

• Data Optimization Hub. Self-service or direct support can help lessen burdens on your team. That’s what our Data Optimization Hub features aim to do. These features make it easy to remove noisy data that obscures the critical insights needed to troubleshoot quickly. Customers can utilize Logz.io self-service tools or direct support from our Support Engineers to identify and remove noisy data.

• Service Map. Open 360 gives your team the opportunity to visualize the data flow, dependencies, and critical performance metrics throughout microservices architecture for easier investigation and troubleshooting through Service Map. It automatically discovers and maps services and the interconnections between them – providing a single view of your entire distributed system within the context of service performance.

• Integrations. Open 360 simplifies the process of observability and monitoring by providing over 300 integrations with systems, apps and services that help your organization run and lessens manual work on your end.

As we continue to evolve our platform, specifically within the context of added automation and AI capabilities, this ability to help workers get the most out of their time and effort will only increase further.

Sign up for a free trial of Open 360 today to see how your organization can benefit from an observability partner fully committed to helping you extend the capabilities of your observability practice.