At least 89% of applications developed today are classified as "complex" according to VMware's State of Observability report for this year. Nearly all respondents (97%) said monitoring cloud application environments is a major challenge, with visibility and insight issues increasing from last year. Do (multi)clouds impede the development of digital economies?

VMware is not ready to conclude just that in its report. Nevertheless, it concludes that modernizing IT landscapes requires significantly improved observability.

Digital transformation is accelerating as organizations adopt cloud-first strategies. As a result, organizations are shifting to multi-cloud environments, adopting more containers and microservices. As a result, more and more distributed systems are emerging, making it harder to assess their performance.

There is no doubt that this creates more complexity. This also goes hand-in-hand with modernizing an organization that today manages thousands of business-critical services. However, many organizations lack a holistic view that helps them understand workloads and infrastructure across the IT stack, including microservices and containers. The end user can suffer negative consequences as there is no complete picture of availability, performance, and resource efficiency.

According to the report, 98% of respondents believe their organization would benefit from better observability capabilities. Observability is a technology that helps to understand what is happening with applications on various layers in a network and why. It is becoming more mainstream as a solution because complexity will only increase as organizations transform their businesses. Organizations are increasingly recognizing the importance of observability in order to reduce complexity, transform effectively and accelerate innovation. An increasing number of organizations are turning to observability solutions to understand critical interdependencies between application workloads and IT infrastructure. When a problem arises, this step can be crucial for identifying the root cause. Within the IT stack, IT teams can see how everything is running and connected.

Monitoring tools cannot do this alone: they can only collect data and alert you when something is wrong. The concept of observability goes beyond monitoring to interpret the data. It explains why something is wrong and how to fix it. The IT department can identify root causes, minimize downtime, and increase operational efficiency.

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