Unlocking the Power of
AIOPs: From Resilience to
Exceptional Experiences

As cloud-native landscapes become more complex, organisations have increasingly turned to Application Performance Monitoring (APM) to enhance their digital immunity and ensure better delivery of end-user experiences. But simply having a best-in-class tool is not enough. Most critically, underlying data sets are often disconnected, making it challenging to translate information into actionable insights. To overcome this hurdle, organizations must establish integrated processes that improve data accessibility, application uptime, and customer experience insights. In our latest blog, we will explore the most practical and high-impact techniques you can use to tackle issues and maximize gain from your APM.

Strengthen APM capabilities within critical customer journeys

Traditionally, IT resiliency efforts focused solely on business-critical applications. However, as components become more interconnected, monitoring multiple applications simultaneously is necessary for proper issue prioritization and resource allocation. Therefore, organizations should shift towards a journey-centered approach. They should quantify the business value of each journey for internal and external customers, identify vulnerabilities and costs associated with system outages, map out critical assets and the single points of failure by journey. For example, an e-commerce company may prioritize critical customer journeys such as product search, shopping cart management, and payment processing. Strengthening the APM within these journeys ensures a seamless experience for customers, minimizing disruptions and maximizing conversions.

Build an integrated view of the technology environment's health

The IT monitoring industry offers various vertical-specific and industry-agnostic tools. These tools are categorized into infrastructure monitoring, classic APM, digital-experience monitoring (DEM), and internal-experience monitoring. However, organizations often struggle with integrating alerts across different tools adopted by different teams, leading to a lack of a shared view of integration across tools. Creating a consolidated "single-pane-of-glass view" contextualized by journeys can speed up response times and decision-making, leading to improved resiliency. For example, Rakuten SixthSense Observability offers a single unified platform for end-to-end monitoring of your entire application ecosystem, right from containers to user-experience.

Establish integrated site-reliability-engineering (SRE) and DevSecOps teams

To achieve a single point of truth, organizations need integrated teams consisting of product managers, software engineers, DevSecOps engineers, IT infrastructure professionals, and business stakeholders. These teams can respond to and address alerts for the customer journey and should be closely aligned with product counterparts to continually improve value propositions through infrastructure and operations automation and observability. For instance, technology giant Google has successfully implemented an integrated SRE and DevSecOps approach. Their collaborative teams enable proactive identification and mitigation of potential disruptions, ensuring reliable services.

Implement chaos engineering and war-gaming techniques

Chaos engineering simulates and tests a system's resiliency across a comprehensive range of scenarios in an isolated environment. By testing and braking systems with worst-case scenarios, organizations can identify and address weaknesses in their tech stack and be better prepared for actual incidents. This will help organizations to improve their APM capabilities by modifying thresholds proactively and building predictive analytics by linking alerts from different systems or tools. For example, Amazon employs chaos engineering to test the resilience of their services, ensuring that their infrastructure can withstand unexpected disruptions and maintain high availability.