A CURE FOR COMPLEXITY

THE LATEST SOLARWINDS IT TRENDS REPORT REVEALS AN ALARMING RISE IN IT COMPLEXITY. SASCHA GIESE, HEAD GEEK AT SOLARWINDS, TALKS ABOUT NEW REALITIES OF HYBRID IT AND HOW OBSERVABILITY CAN HELP.

Can you share with us key findings from this year’s report?

We do this survey every year, and this year, we wanted to understand our customers’ pain points. And it is simple – IT complexity. The level of complexity might vary depending on the organisation, but it is still the biggest problem they are currently facing. The reasons for this are manifold. If an organisation wants to gain a competitive advantage and offer new services, they usually put in place some new technologies that would bring benefits to the business. The problem is that every new technology needs people who understand and can manage it. And it is not always easy, and if you look at smaller IT teams, they don’t have the time for new technologies because there is always something else they need to fix. Similarly, some organisations can’t afford to get skilled resources on board to deal with these new technologies. So rising IT complexity is the biggest problem we have discovered.

What is creating this increasing IT complexity?

It is the changing business requirements that are contributing to this. Each new product – be it software or hardware- that anyone sells, including us, we say is easier to use. But you must remember that an organisation doesn’t have one or two tools – they have 100s. So the whole construct in IT is getting more complex, and it is based on the changing requirements of the business. Everything has to be available 24/7 from everywhere. That wasn’t the case 10-15 years ago, and it will only worsen. If you look at modern application delivery, we have decentralised applications with microservices and multiple hyperscalers, and no one understands this landscape anymore. This is complexity, and definitely, the root cause is digital transformation.

Why is it challenging to manage hybrid IT environments today?

I think one of the challenges is constant change. If something works in a particular way today, it might work differently tomorrow. You can’t really plan things anymore. When you put something in the cloud, you do it because of availability, scalability, etc. That is fine, but you have zero control over what really happens there. So it is useless if we don’t understand applications anymore, and how it impacts the whole organisation, not just the operational IT team. It also has an impact on many other things, such as security. If we don’t understand how an application talks to another, we can’t distinguish normal operations from a threat in the background.

Is it a problem faced by large enterprises rather than small businesses?

It is more for larger enterprises because a small company probably won’t need distributed application delivery. However, they still face different problems, but the really complex construct in IT is something for the enterprise. They want the latest and greatest in technology without even considering if it is an advantage to the business; they just want it. And they get it even if they don’t need it and create this unnecessary complexity.

You are talking about the need for observability in this report. Is it because traditional monitoring tools aren’t doing the job?

Observability has become a buzzword and means different things to different people. On a basic level, it is just an evolution of monitoring. We now have access to more data from distributed applications, cloud, etc., and traditional monitoring tools, created 10-15 years ago, can’t cope with these dynamic environments. So we needed evolution, and that is observability. Previously, we were more interested in finding out if an application is available and working. Now, we want to know what my application does all the time. How is it behaving, and what is happening inside it? This will allow us to optimise these workloads further, which is why we need observability.

Can your platform observe the entire IT stack?

We come from a network management system background and have grown significantly in these last 15 years. Our current platform is called hybrid cloud observability, and as the name suggests, we deal with onprem, private cloud, public cloud, and multicloud. So we can observe their infrastructure, applications, and networks wherever the customer is. In addition, we have specific insights into more complex applications, like databases, Active Directory, etc. And we use many different technologies so that we are no longer stuck with SNMP or WMI.