The Future of IT Operations: Harnessing Observability and AI for Proactive Decision-Making

When it comes to visibility and awareness for IT operations, solutions have evolved from traditional monitoring tools to full-stack observability platforms—a shift that reflects the growing challenges that organizations face with enterprise visibility. A Gartner report found that 41% of employees use technology that IT can’t see and track, acquiring, modifying, or creating tech without IT’s knowledge. This figure is expected to hit 75% by 2027.

Forward-thinking teams are now looking to observability and AI for predictive analytics and proactive issue resolution to reduce downtime, enhance security, and improve user experience. Firms that fail to adopt observability are left with outdated, reactive monitoring solutions ill-equipped to manage increasing IT complexity.

This article discusses how observability and AI are becoming cornerstones for proactive IT decision-making, even as enterprise visibility grows more challenging.

The Evolution of IT Visibility: From Monitoring to Observability

IT teams have traditionally relied on monitoring solutions that track predefined metrics, logs, and alerts within specific IT components, often operating in silos. While effective for detecting known issues, legacy monitoring tools lack the capability to uncover hidden dependencies and root causes in today’s complex and dynamic environments. 

As enterprises plan for the future, many are moving beyond traditional monitoring to adopt full-stack observability for greater resilience and efficiency.

Proactive Problem-Solving with AI-Driven Insights

Full-stack observability provides a comprehensive, real-time view across the entire IT ecosystem, integrating metrics, logs, traces, and AI-driven insights. By delivering holistic, live insights into an IT environment’s health and performance, observability empowers IT teams with deep visibility into complex, distributed environments, enabling a shift towards proactive IT operations.

Consider the following scenario: a large enterprise’s IT operations team is responsible for managing an IT infrastructure that continues to increase in size and complexity. With this expansion comes an explosive increase in the volume of event data generated. To maintain optimal IT service levels while driving innovation and staying competitive, the enterprise adopts observability and AIOps to scale its ability to ensure the health, performance, and availability of critical systems. 

AI-powered observability platforms, such as Broadcom DX Operational Observability (DX O2), provide capabilities like cross-domain correlation, intelligent alarm management, and automated triage to optimize IT service levels across complex IT environments.

Improved User Experiences and Reduced Downtime

Unknown unknowns—issues or risks that are completely unforeseen or unanticipated—often emerge from complex interactions within systems and environments. These are problems that neither IT teams nor traditional monitoring tools can predict, as they fall outside the scope of known metrics, logs, and alerts. As IT environments grow more intricate, these unknown unknowns can lead to critical failures or security breaches if not detected early.

Observability reduces the occurrence of unknown unknowns by providing holistic, real-time visibility into every layer of the IT ecosystem. This enables IT teams to uncover hidden patterns, detect anomalies, and proactively address issues before they escalate into major disruptions. 

Also, IT teams can intelligently optimize application performance with user-centric metrics (e.g., real user monitoring and synthetic monitoring) to improve the user experience. Broadcom DX O2 provides these crucial metrics, enabling teams to understand the inner workings of their systems and applications.

Best Practices for Adopting Observability Platforms

Successfully integrating observability into existing enterprise IT ecosystems requires strategic alignment with broader digital transformation goals. Organizations should ensure that observability supports their overall goals of improving operational efficiency, enhancing customer experience, and driving innovation.

IT operations teams looking to implement an observability platform should prioritize scalability and interoperability when evaluating solutions. 

Future-Proofing Enterprise Observability

As enterprises evolve, their IT ecosystems inevitably become more complex—with a mix of on-premises, cloud, and hybrid infrastructures, along with container clusters, serverless computing environments, and more. 

Organizations should ensure that prospective observability platforms can integrate seamlessly across these diverse environments and technology stacks, providing unified insights that scale with the organization’s growth and technological advancements.

Observability for Enhancing Collaboration

Observability should serve as a catalyst for greater collaboration between IT teams and business units. When evaluating solutions, IT operations teams should prioritize features that facilitate seamless communication and alignment between these groups. 

IT teams bring the necessary technical expertise to implement observability solutions, while business units are instrumental in defining key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflect user experience and business impact. By promoting cross-functional collaboration, organizations can ensure that observability efforts are closely aligned with both technical and business objectives. 

This collaborative approach ensures that observability not only monitors system performance but also delivers actionable insights that drive informed decision-making, fostering both technical improvements and business success. Leading observability platforms, such as Broadcom DX O2, include features like unified dashboarding, service observability, and third-party integrations to enhance IT-business collaboration across the enterprise.

Observability and AI Over the Next Decade

Most technology professionals are likely to agree that IT predictions for the next decade are, at best, uncertain. However, one thing is for certain: as enterprise complexity increases, the future of IT operations will be deeply connected to the integration of observability and AIOps. Full-stack observability, when combined with AIOps, empowers IT teams to detect issues proactively, predict potential problems, and automate responses—significantly reducing manual intervention and improving operational efficiency.

As organizations pursue greater innovation and operational efficiency, the ability to leverage observability and AIOps to dynamically optimize, streamline, and automate IT operations will become a competitive differentiator. 

Observability platforms like Broadcom DX O2 are uniquely positioned to support this future. With advanced capabilities like cross-domain correlation, intelligent alarm management, and automated triage, DX O2 is not only equipped to meet the demands of today’s complex IT environments but also prepared to scale and evolve with the needs of the future enterprise.

Contact an A&I team member today and find out how observability and AI can improve your IT operations for the future.