Latest Developments in Monitoring and Observability, 2023

You know it’s going to be a great day when you find yourself mentioned as a Sample Vendor on the Gartner® Hype Cycle™ report for Monitoring and Observability, 2023(July 2023). The OnPage team is thrilled to share with its community that we have been mentioned as a Sample Vendor by Gartner on their latest Hype Cycle for Monitoring and Observability. OnPage is recognized as a Sample Vendor, specifically within the Automated Incident Response category.

In this blog, we’ll summarize our views on select technologies that were analyzed in this year’s Hype Cycle and conclude with our analysis of how AIR solutions play out within the realm of monitoring and observability tools.

We draw upon our analysis of the Hype Cycle report and our individual insights into the Monitoring and Observability market to uncover key trends, while recommending readers consult the original Gartner report for a comprehensive understanding of the subject.

OnPage’s View on Key Technologies from this Year’s  Hype Cycle  

OnPage believes that industries are evolving at a neck-breaking speed. While we have alluded to this in our previous blogs, it remains important to stress the rapid pace at which industries are changing, largely underpinned by technology, such as cloud adoption and AI-based automation. We think that the pace of this change is unprecedented, and it presents a legitimate challenge for infrastructure and operation (I&O) leaders to stay one step ahead of incidents.

Simply put, while the benefits of digital transformation far outweigh the perceived risks, the fact of the matter is that I&O leaders are still challenged to find ways to respond to incidents faster and more effectively. To address this, we’ve noticed an increased investment in Monitoring and Observability tools. The technology holds significant potential in decoding the complexity presented by telemetry data and unshackling organizations from the traditional monitoring approaches.

To that end, OnPage agrees with the insights reported by Gartner:

“Continued digital transformation investment is driving comparatively higher growth in the digital experience monitoring (DEM) market due to the need for improved customer experience and better employee engagement.” (Gartner® 1,2023)

The following four technologies have caught our attention here – Automated Incident Response, Service Operations, AIOps and Site Reliability Engineering. At OnPage, we believe that these technologies hold the promise of enhancing the speed to market, agility and resilience of IT and tech teams. Let’s uncover each one of these technologies and understand their significance in the scope of Monitoring and Observability.

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To begin with, let’s decode Service Operations and understand how this technology is instrumental in quickly diagnosing and resolving critical incidents for organizations that are facing increased complexity from their digital investments.

According to Gartner,

“Service Operations is the convergence of the infrastructure and application monitoring environments with the ITSM incident management practice to create a more effective and optimized mechanism for diagnosing and resolving incidents. The combination of the two environments with the context of AI can lead to a significant reduction in both the number and impact of incidents.” (Gartner 23, 2023)

At OnPage, our wealth of experience in incident management spans centuries, providing us a distinctive viewpoint into the intricacies of the service operations ecosystem. We are acutely aware of the pressures that businesses confront in maintaining reliable and stable services. This necessitates eliminating incidents before they escalate and take down business-critical services, all while firefighting with siloed ecosystems that lack seamless connectivity and information synchronization across critical systems.

With a customer-centered approach, we’ve immersed ourselves in the challenges faced by our clients, positioning us to develop targeted solutions that address issues like alert fatigue, on-call management and alert handling. Simultaneously, our commitment to seamless workflows is evident through our provision of bi-directional integrations between popular ITSM systems and our alerting tool.

Now, let’s pivot our focus and delve into the realm of AIOps —an emerging technology that has captured significant eyeballs and become a hot topic of discussion.

“Gartner defines AIOps platform as the application of AI/ML and data analytics at the

event management level in order to augment, accelerate, and automate manual efforts in

the event management process and associated procedures. AIOps platforms are defined by the key characteristics of cross-domain event ingestion, topology assembly, event correlation and reduction, pattern recognition, and remediation augmentation.” (Gartner 74, 2023)

At OnPage, we believe that this technology is still in its early stages of development. While vendors are unleashing numerous use cases to optimize, speed up and automate the laborious aspects of incident management, the technology may still lack precision, especially for edge-case scenarios. Recognizing that at its core, this technology entails intricate learning and adaptation mechanisms, accurately predicting edge-case scenarios might necessitate several months, if not years of dedicated fine-tuning.

Shifting our focus, let’s delve into Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). According to Gartner:

“Site reliability engineering (SRE) is a collection of systems and software engineering principles used to design and operate scalable resilient systems. Site reliability engineers work with the customer or product owner to understand operational requirements and define service-level objectives (SLOs). Site reliability engineers work with product or platform teams to design and continuously improve systems that meet defined SLOs.” (Gartner 71, 2023)

OnPage recognizes that at its core, SRE is a practice that drives scalable resilience and reliability in existing or new products. Simply put, this discipline merges the two fields of software engineering and IT operations, employing a data-driven approach to managing and automating operations and ensuring systems meet specific reliability targets.

We at OnPage believe that as businesses continue to adopt microservices, containers and serverless architecture, SRE will play a pivotal role in maintaining the stability and optimal performance of these complex distributed systems. As such, the future points toward increased integration of DevOps principles and a stronger focus on end-to-end service reliability.

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Automated Incident Response

Gartner outlines the definition of Automated Incident Response (AIR) as follows:

“Automated incident response (AIR) centralizes alert or incident routing through a policy or rule-based engine, on-call scheduler and streamlined collaboration. AIR solution capabilities improve operational efficiencies with action-oriented insights, shorter incident durations and automated workflows for event routing, easier collaboration, remediation and escalations.” (Gartner 89, 2023)

OnPage believes that Automated Incident Response (AIR) emerges as a transformational technology within the context of Monitoring and Observability. We believe that the placement of Automated Incident Response in the Slope of Enlightenment demonstrates that diverse organizations fully understand the technology’s use cases, risks, applications and benefits. Commercial off-the-shelf tools are facilitating its adoption, indicating a clear trajectory for progress.

So, why is AIR gaining such attention? Based on our understanding, manual incident resolution processes have long been a pain point for organizations, particularly considering the presence of fragmented teams, cross-domain tech engineers, and the need for swift responses. From our perspective, AIR addresses these challenges by streamlining alert handling and incident management. Additionally, AIR offers actionable insights, reduces incident duration and automates workflows for efficient event handling, seamless collaboration, effective resolution and timely escalations.

However, challenges persist such as articulating the unique value of investing in AIR when overlapping capabilities with ITSM and event management systems exist. Configuring service definitions and migrating between AIR vendors can further compound the situation. Nonetheless, by framing AIR as an immediate value generator for optimizing incident management workflows, I&O leaders might be able to get buy-in from their senior management.

As a leading AIR vendor, we believe that OnPage underscores the multifaceted benefits of this technology. These encompass rapid incident resolution, enhanced on-call management capabilities, valuable insights for process improvement, and automated workflows to reduce errors. Our clients highlight capabilities such as on-call management, bi-directional integration with monitoring and service desk systems and improved incident communication through ChatOps tools. With confidence, at OnPage, we think that AIR has not only matured but gained significant traction.

Conclusion

We believe, that being included in Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Monitoring and Observability, 2023 report as a Sample Vendor in the Automated Incident Response space is a significant milestone for OnPage. The company continues to be dedicated to advancing incident response automation and efficiency.

We must mention that our journey doesn’t stop here; instead, it propels us to continue pushing boundaries, seeking novel ways to elevate incident response practices. At OnPage, our steadfast commitment to advancing incident response technology places us at the forefront of driving efficient and reliable IT operations.

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