By: Kumaraswamy Krishnapillai, Solution Architect LTIMindtree

Observability is a foundational capability needed for making data-driven decisions around Artificial Intelligence Operations (AIOps) both in development and operations. This will minimize unplanned service interruption to provide business stakeholders with an Amazon-esque self-service experience.

This blog intends to share insights on the challenges in business process reliability. It will precisely deal with predicting, detecting, and proactively solving potential issues before they happen. It also highlights how LTIMindtree’s “InsightOps” observability solution will assist the stakeholders, with the use of technology and digital transformation, to overcome these challenges.

This blog is primarily directed at the personas of:

• Product Owner
• DevOps Engineer
• Site Reliability Engineer
• Solution Architect
• Business Analyst

Business challenges

In today’s technology-driven world, businesses rely heavily on their systems to deliver products and services to customers. Any system issues or unplanned downtime can lead to loss of revenue, dissatisfied customers, and damage to the business’s reputation. As organizations embark on digital transformation, the application estates lead to composable architecture, and automation becomes ubiquitous across the enterprise. Organizations need always-available applications to deliver high performance, help deliver products or services on time, and monetize data for faster decision-making.

These needs drive new capabilities such as monitoring composable SAP application estates, predictive analysis, expanded AIOps scenarios, scalable models, and data-driven insights. It requires modern, best-in-class features, including full-stack monitoring, dynamic baselining of KPIs, visualization of the process bottlenecks, event correlation, and pragmatic automation to provide the needed capabilities to address the industry needs.

What is needed to address the challenges?

An end-to-end observability solution supporting these features for businesses running on composable SAP application estates is critical to address these challenges. The solution should have the following capabilities to deliver the needed features:

• Discovering critical user journeys and Service Level Objectives (SLOs)
• Monitoring logs, traces, and metrics related to networks, systems, and applications.
• Performance monitoring of applications
• Business process and digital experience monitoring
• Predictive models to perform preventive maintenance
• Event correlation and AIOps capabilities

LTIMindtree InsightOps observability solution

LTIMindtree’s InsightOps solution provides full-stack observability of any solution, irrespective of underlying technologies. The reimagined single pane of glass observability solution is engineered on best-of-breed stacks enriched by Cisco’s AppDynamics observability cloud solution. The solution comes with pre-built Service Level Indicators (SLIs) libraries for end-to-end business processes for various industries.

Picture: LTIM InsightOps Solution Architecture

The salient features of LTIMindtree InsightOps architecture:

1. Configurable and portable solution: Flexible solution architecture allows configurable customer-specific architectural requirements. It can also integrate with existing tools/ monitoring solutions, visualization tools, and IT Service Management (ITSM) tools.
2. Protect Investment: Component-based solutions help amplify the current monitoring investments such as Solution Manager and other tools. Easy to manage and maintain with less technical expertise.
3. Auto-discovery: Tool-based reverse engineering of business process improvement areas with a focus on observability and identification of the use cases.
4. Accelerated deployment: Pre-built Key Performance Indicator (KPI)/SLI libraries, templates, and solution components helped to do faster sprinting of observability user stories
5. Observe what matters: Algorithms allow us to prioritize the use cases and customers to observe selective scenarios.

The LTIMindtree InsightOps provide flexibility to customize the solution architecture by leveraging existing investments made in the organization on various components, including the collection, aggregation, and visualization layers of the architecture.

Conclusions

To achieve the goal of resilient observability, customers need a single pane of glass where one can monitor the business process performance across different applications, irrespective of the underlying technology. Observability is a key imperative for the success of predictive monitoring. LTIMindtree’s InsightOps observability solution is unique, with pre-built industry-specific SLIs.

The success of observability also depends on processing the currently observable data to identify essential SLIs and SLOs and finding ways to track them successfully. Finally, this is about cultural change. While monitoring is an operations task, observability is a software engineering task.