Four reasons to accelerate your journey to full-stack observability

In a world where apps are now the face of your business, exceptional customer experiences are more critical than ever. With 57 percent of users reporting that they won’t use a brand if a digital service does not perform as expected, companies know they have little room for error.¹ That explains why digital transformation spending is forecasted to reach $2.8 trillion in 2025 globally, more than double the amount allocated in 2020.² With these numbers, it’s clear that digital transformation initiatives are growing—and without any signs of slowing down in the race to deliver premium customer experiences.  

The explosive growth of digital services has also accelerated numerous challenges for organizations and their teams as they try to provide seamless customer experiences. To quickly identify issues, they need visibility into all IT technology domains from the application through the infrastructure to the network and security architecture, on-demand. But today’s infrastructure is growing more and more complex, beyond the scale of human capacity to make sense of it all. Thankfully, full-stack observability (FSO) is a solution that can deliver the multidomain visibility, insights, and actions needed to maximize the value of your customer’s digital experience. 

“CEOs have come to realize that their business architecture is in fact, their technology architecture. And if there’s a problem, it’s going to get back to their business and they have to make sure that they can identify, resolve, and potentially avoid the problem more so than ever before.”

—Stephen Elliot, IDC Group VP and Analyst

To dive deeper into full-stack observability and why it’s gaining mindshare, I had an opportunity to sit down with industry leaders for their insights and observations during a recent webinar on Accelerating the Journey to Full-Stack Observability.  

Driving forces behind the need for full-stack observability 

So, how exactly did we get here? Joe Byrne, CTO of AppDynamics at Cisco, helps customers and prospects with observability strategies and digital transformation. He points to a recent AppDynamics study, in which 1,200 global IT leaders were asked about some of the drivers fueling the need for full-stack observability. Here are four of the top reasons leaders are keen to accelerate their FSO journey.  

• Growing IT complexity: The rate of technology innovation and the rapid growth of data are driving leaders to rethink their “organizational constructs and the role that teams are making collaboratively to identify and resolve problems across their digital transformation projects,” says Stephen. And Joe agrees. While there’s a need to simplify processes for product quality and customer experience, both say there’s also a need to improve feedback mechanisms for product and DevOps teams to make their jobs easier and more efficient.
• Increase in customer expectation: When consumers can switch brands as quickly as they can swipe, it’s no surprise that 46 percent of companies are prioritizing their organization’s customer experience in the next five years.³ And in doing so, these companies are setting the bar high, with the potential to double their revenue within 36 months.³ Companies also know that a good experience means customers are willing to spend 86 percent,³ more and why not? “When it’s not a good experience, they’re on to the next, and they don’t care if you have an army of engineers behind you,” explains Joe.
• Major outage concerns: The cost of a bad experience is high, and it can take 12 positive customer experiences to make up for one negative one.⁴ Therefore, another area of concern that organizations are focusing on is avoiding major outages. While many companies allocate significant resources on cutting-edge technology to wow their customers, these advances don’t matter much if speed, convenience, and the right information are lacking.
• Pandemic and hybrid work: In today’s post-pandemic era, where people and workforces are more dispersed, the complexity of hybrid work and customer engagement models are driving a dramatic increase in FSO and a rise in demand for the benefits it offers. These include visibility, actionable insights, and shared context—enabling IT teams to get to the bottom of application performance issues faster.

Although there’s no clear starting place to launch your full-stack observability journey, Joe says 50 percent of companies naturally begin in the infrastructure. But for every company, this will differ based on where they are at on their digital transformation path.  

“With great customer experiences, you have great business outcomes. That’s what our customers emphasize to us all the time, and we’re there to help them with that.”

—Chris Rittler, Cisco VP of CX Product Management

Build observability for the future  

Organizations need full-stack observability to cope with expansive IT landscapes and the increased complexity created by rapid rates of innovation—but you don’t have to do it alone. 

With increased collaboration occurring around cross-functional teams, Chris explains that Cisco’s approach to achieving complete full-stack observability is based on real-world customer use cases. With tangible use case examples, Chris says Cisco can help customers understand the value of full-stack observability while helping them gain the capabilities they need. 

“We’re in a multicloud world, so complexity will only go up. It’s an exciting time to be looking at this. And certainly, the pandemic has driven a tremendous amount of interest, awareness, and budget allocation toward the idea of full-stack observability.” 

—Stephen Elliot, IDC Group VP and Analyst

Cisco Business Critical Services for full-stack observability currently consist of services to support customer use cases aligned to performance, optimization, and security. These three services are currently available: 

Regardless of where you’re at on your observability journey, Cisco Business Critical Services can help you transform your business with our unparalleled, analytics-driven expertise to achieve the outcomes you need—starting today. 

To learn more about Cisco’s full-stack observability services and solutions, don’t miss the presentation by Director of Cisco CX Cloud Product Management Eric Charlesworth at Cisco Live. And come see us at CX booth #2274 in the World of Solutions to speak to the Software and Services Experts, or visit our full-stack observability page to discover even more. 

¹Cisco, 2022 

²IDC, 2021 

³SuperOffice, 2021 

⁴HelpScout, 2021 

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