A long time ago in a NOC far, far away, performance monitoring tools were designed to monitor critical on-premise assets. 

The process of onboarding devices and data was largely manual, and oftentimes meant visibility was designed to be partial at best; monitoring critical assets was enough. When something went wrong somewhere beyond the scope of the platform (which is generally where things went terribly wrong), engineers went looking the old-fashioned way. 

Cue scrambles, late nights, and finger-pointing

With the ubiquity of SaaS, the increase in cloud-based infrastructure, new protocols, data types, general complexity, and VOLUME, the tools of yesterday no longer meet the needs of today. More modern monitoring capabilities have been introduced, allowing for broader real-time visibility and far greater insights.

Challenges remain, and the stakes have never been higher. There was a time when we all thought the network was a thing of the past—relegated to internal development or legacy apps. Everything would live in one cloud with one bundled visibility tool helping shine a light on challenges. Voila! Problem solved.

Not so fast

The reality is, few businesses are putting all their eggs in one basket. Why? They believe multi-cloud is a natural stepping stone and is here to stay. Cloud architectures are fluid and applications are everywhere. They follow no standard when it comes to integration or onboarding. 

As a result, resources become more constrained and tasking people with full-stack alert mitigation is simply not scalable.

Between these challenges and the hope that AI will be here soon to help, modern monitoring platforms continue to fall short of nirvana when it comes to delivering on the promise of observability. To close the gap, businesses need to address and refine their monitoring strategy in three key areas:

1. Visibility Powered by Inventory

As we all know, you can’t monitor what you can’t see. But how can you easily, repeatably, and consistently onboard devices and data into your monitoring platform to ensure you can see it all? Modern monitoring practices require automated full-stack, full-view device and data onboarding for all infrastructure and applications that power a business.

2. Intelligence Derived from Accurate Data

Today’s network is the backbone of an organization. More complex than ever and even more critical as well. Automated device and data onboarding is required to address the sheer volume of information a modern monitoring platform needs to consume to deliver strategic insights.

3. Actions Driven by Automation

Modern monitoring platforms deliver “actionable insights” to businesses. But the question remains: insights actioned by whom? Network teams, DevOps engineers, and SREs are already pushed to their limits, and increasing complexity means increasing volume. Hiring and training at this kind of scale just isn’t an option.  

Pliant’s API-driven low-code ‘action blocks’ allow users to create common workflows for modern monitoring platforms.

Delivering on the Promise of Observability 

With all this, expectations have changed and processes need to evolve along with them. 

Expectations for performance monitoring have grown, with visibility now a part of a process that includes device onboarding, alert remediation, and insights that can be actioned automatically. Complex infrastructure, increasing volume, greater responsibilities, and the need to do more with less mean automation is a must. But how do you couple performance monitoring with automation—at scale—to address this new reality?

Pliant gives operations and engineering teams simplified and streamlined ways to automate, integrate, and connect their environments. Rather than task talented and costly developers to manage NPM manually, Pliant customers can build automated workflows quickly, efficiently, and repeatably.

Pliant has abstracted thousands of APIs from popular vendor products. The resulting low-code ‘action blocks’ make it easy, fast, and flexible for users to create common workflows for modern monitoring platforms like IBM SevOne NPM.

To learn more, visit https://pliant.io/what-we-do/observability/