Sascha Giese, tech evangelist, SolarWinds
A well-executed home renovation goes beyond cosmetic repairs and surface-level aesthetics by delving into the structural bones of a home. This approach not only revitalises the house’s appearance but also enhances its overall efficiency and maintenance. Meaningful digital transformation also requires such an approach.
However, a recent report from Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee examines the government’s past digital transformation efforts and suggests previous projects prioritised style over substance. “Improvements in government’s digital services over the last 25 years have focused on citizens’ online experience, without substantially the ageing legacy systems that sit beneath departmental and government websites,” the report states. “These have resulted in services which, although they might look good on the surface, are costly and problematic to run.”
Previous digital transformation efforts have contributed to the government’s complex current operational environment, which mixes legacy, hybrid, and cloud technology. This environment makes it difficult for IT administrators to monitor and manage distributed network, cloud, system, application, and database infrastructure. In such circumstances, it isn’t unusual for different teams, departments, and agencies to acquire their own monitoring tools, creating toolset creep, inefficiencies, and even shadow IT concerns.
In this environment, the government needs to streamline its IT operations and prioritize end-to-end visibility across the IT stack. One long-term solution is observability, which provides centralised insights, automated analytics, and actional intelligence across on-premises and multi-cloud environments.
Here are a few ways observability goes beyond traditional monitoring, and some of the capabilities that can help government IT leaders efficiently manage hybrid IT complexity:
- Centralise visibility and reduce tool sprawl
Traditionally, government organisations adopted a diverse set of best-of-breed products to monitor and manage different parts of their technology stacks. However, over time this approach has led to tool sprawl and escalating costs. Disparate monitoring tools also often result in information silos, conflicting data, and alert fatigue—all of which make it more difficult to pinpoint and resolve IT issues or outages.
Observability provides end-to-end oversight of service delivery and component dependencies across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. Through a single pane of glass, teams can receive health scores and insights across networks, applications, databases, and systems. This fully integrated view enables IT teams to identify and diagnose service issues and determine root causes more efficiently.
Having a single source of truth for the entire IT environment also eliminates the need for other piecemeal monitoring and IT management tools, helping reduce tool sprawl and optimise IT spend.
- Gain foresight with AIOps
Observability solutions can apply cross-domain correlation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) to analyse data from across the entire IT environment, resulting in deep but digestible insights into network operations. With this intelligent view of an organization’s sprawling infrastructure, government IT administrators can reduce alert noise and accelerate issue remediation.
AIOps-powered observability also allows administrators to anticipate network issues, detect anomalies, and proactively address issues before they impact availability, the employee experience, and day-to-day operations. Machine learning technology also means the solution will continually learn and improve its intelligent alerting capabilities over time.
- Modernise while maintaining support for legacy systems
As the UK central government aims to accelerate more meaningful, end-to-end digital transformation and modern technology investments, the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) has published its digital roadmap to 2025, Transforming for a Digital Future. The plan appropriately prioritises decommissioning and migrating ‘high risk’ legacy systems. However, legacy IT systems deemed lower risk will likely remain in place for some time, meaning IT admins will still need to manage complex hybrid environments.
Teams should look for an observability solution that can seamlessly onboard new applications, services, and infrastructure while still providing comprehensive visibility into the legacy apps and systems many government agencies still rely on. With AIOps, observability can also help uncover dependencies between disparate systems, making it easier to identify changes affecting application and service delivery. By leveraging an observability solution that can be self-hosted or in the cloud, government agencies can select the deployment option that works best for them now and in the future.
The recent Public Accounts Committee report underscores how previously prioritising front-end modernization over legacy systems has contributed to the government’s complex operational environment. To address this complexity and prepare for more sweeping digital transformation efforts, IT teams should prioritise observability. With end-to-end visibility, IT teams can properly oversee their entire house of IT infrastructure, sunset piecemeal monitoring tools, and increase productivity with AIOps.
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