COVID-19 accelerated digital transformation projects worldwide, on average three times faster compared with other years. However, the rapid speed of innovation created additional complexities and forced information technology professionals to reevaluate their entire IT stack.

AppDynamics, a Cisco Systems Inc. company, dove deeper into this concept known as full-stack observability in its latest Agents of Transformation 2021 report released Tuesday, which gauges how organizations are managing soaring IT complexity post-COVID-19.

AppDynamics surveyed 1,050 IT professionals in 11 markets, including the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. The respondents, consisting of chief information officers, board-level directors and senior to midlevel IT management, work in various industries, such as financial services, retail, manufacturing, automotive and the public sector. This follows a previous report AppDynamics conducted at the onset of the pandemic to understand the immediate impact of COVID-19 on IT.

Nearly a year later, AppDynamics found the vast majority (96%) of IT professionals now believe it’s essential to monitor all technical areas across the IT stack and directly link that performance to business outcomes. Seventy-nine percent of IT professionals see technology decisions directly impacting business performance, yet two-thirds lack the strategy and tools to measure how technology decisions impact business outcomes.

The sentiment was echoed at this week’s AppDynamics Transform 2021 Digital Event. Adam Rasner, vice president of technology operations at AutoNation, discussed the growing importance of full-stack observability for his organization. Prior to using AppDynamics, AutoNation had the typical management strategy of using multiple management tools, few of which actually talked to each other.

During his Q&A with AppDynamics General Manager Linda Tong, he talked about how the company was looking at a number of new initiatives, such as virtual reality, that require all parts of the technology stack to work together, further increasing the need for full-stack observability. Rasner was able to quantify the value of AppDynamics when he stated that critical issues have been reduced by 90%, giving the business more confidence in IT.

The role of the technology professional is anything but easy. IT professionals are feeling immense pressure, as they deal with growing technology complexity. The report named four main anxiety-causing factor: A new set new set of priorities and challenges (80%), technology sprawl and legacy technologies (78%), acceleration to cloud computing (77%), and multiple disconnected solutions (74%).

“During digital transformation, organizations move from on-premises apps to rolling out more cloud services and such,” Gregg Ostrowski, regional chief technology officer at AppDynamics, told me in a briefing.  “They’re not throwing anything away but continuing to build upon existing technologies, so the stacks are becoming a little bit more challenging to put the clothes on, so to speak. Those rushing in to transform their business have started to encompass the challenges around technology sprawl and focus on what matters most.”

The pace of change is expected to accelerate even further this year, as organizations deal with a turbulent economy in the COVID-19 aftermath. Looking ahead, IT professionals want to have observability across the full IT estate, with 76% of AppDynamics survey respondents acknowledging that they can no longer afford to “rely on gut instinct.” Most want to invest in a single, unified observability platform that can monitor the full technology stack, rather than having several, disjointed monitoring solutions.

The five key areas IT professionals want to monitor are: Applications and services health, network and infrastructure health (including traditional, cloud and wide area networks), issues and tickets on user and business impacts, front-end and back-end services, and metrics/events for the entire IT ecosystem. It’s this integration of application infrastructure with applications that prompted Cisco to buy AppDynamics several years ago.

A critical next step for organizations is aligning full-stack observability with business performance. In fact, 92% of IT professionals believe linking technology performance to business outcomes — such as customer experience, sales transactions and revenue — will help them achieve innovation goals over the next year. Furthermore, 96% feel connecting full-stack observability with real-time business outcomes is needed to provide first-class digital experiences.

The report’s findings point to the fact that IT professionals must focus on what happens both inside and outside their IT environment. That means monitoring infrastructure — including network, security and technology — that isn’t directly controlled by the organization like the public internet and cloud. But it also means understanding how IT issues and incidents impact the business and the user experience.

“Ultimately, it boils down to user experience,” said Ostrowski. “If you can’t provide a good user experience because you’re lacking tools and visibility, you’re going to start to fail, and your customer base is going to start to fail.”

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

Image: AppDynamics