Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM, AIOps, Observability, OpenTelemetry, and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2022. Part 3 covers Observability.

Start with: 2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with: 2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

AIOPS AND OBSERVABILITY CONVERGE

Observability and AIOps will converge to unlock increased value. The inextricable link between observability and AIOps will become commonplace by the end of 2022 as organizations increasingly recognize the importance of taking action on observability, and their data, with machine learning when critical issues occur.
Splunk IT and Observability Predictions 2022 Report

To unlock the true power of data, AIOps and observability need to be understood as inextricably linked. Organizations must eliminate data silos, adopting a holistic data and machine learning strategy to create an environment that is continuously observing, learning and improving itself. Throughout 2022 organizations will start to arm themselves with both observability and AIOps to enable swift action on their data and easily automate responses. AIOps tools will be enabling DevOps workflows and we'll see more vendors explicitly join their observability message to an AIOps message.
Shawn Bice
President of Products and Technology, Splunk

OBSERVABILITY SPLITS INTO MULTIPLE FORMS

Observability splinters into various forms: network observability, data observability, edge and IoT observability, code-level observability and so on. What will change is that vendors will start to ‘shift-left' observability to pre-production, meaning it's no longer observability at all, it's really an extension of extremely robust synthetic monitoring and testing before and after production.
Jason English
Principal Analyst, Intellyx

OBSERVABILITY BECOMES MISSION CRITICAL

The success of every modern organization hinges on delivering great digital experiences to employees, customers, and partners. That means that business is powered by the underlying infrastructure, networks, applications, microservices, and software that deliver those experiences. This trend has only been accelerated by the pandemic, which increased reliance on digital experiences for connecting with family, friends, co-workers, teachers, and doctors; shopping—and enjoying entertainment online. This year's Observability Forecast (a global survey of nearly 1,300 IT leaders, software engineers, and developers across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia) reinforced the importance of this trend. 90% of respondents said that observability is critical to the success of their business, and 94% state that it's critical to their role. Also, Gartner noted that they expect enterprises to increase their adoption of observability tools by 30% by 2024. So what's next? More than 80% of C-Suite executives stated in that same Observability Forecastthat they expect to see their observability budgets increase next year, with 20% expecting budgets to increase significantly, further pushing observability to the mainstream.
Buddy Brewer
GVP and GM, New Relic

Companies are all operating with and have access to the same data — all from the same systems. Companies that will demonstrate a leadership position in 2022 will use that data to better inform customers of what is happening in their infrastructure. How can companies better utilize the data and apply intelligence to help customers make decisions and sift through all the noise? End users expect deep insight into their data and expect vendors to offer the best experience they can to identify and resolve issues and give them observability of their systems. With true observability, we can give customers back time to focus on what really matters, which is managing the digital experiences for their customers, and empowering them to meet their customers' needs.
Frank Reno
Principal PM and Open Source Ambassador, Sumo Logic

OPEN SOURCE OBSERVABILITY

Open source observability will continue to become central to an increasing number of Enterprises and not just cloud natives.
Jonah Kowall
CTO, Logz.io

Observability is the art of answering the unknown unknowns — answers to questions you have not envisioned while designing the system. While this is a great goal to have — what about growing the list of known unknowns? We will see more open source tools operated in a community context, gathering data before being deployed in a production environment, so that they ship with more known unknowns to be observed. This is a true shift left in open source communities, actually gaining operational data and therefore making the software not just observable, but also learning and improving from the observations being made.
Marcel Hild
Manager AIOps, Office of the CTO, Red Hat

Observability shifts from "it's complicated" to an "open" relationship: Having a variety of tools to choose from creates challenges in telemetry data collection. Organizations find themselves managing multiple libraries for logging, metrics, and traces, with each vendor having its own APIs, SDKs, agents, and collectors. An open source, community-driven approach to observability will gain steam in 2022 to remove unnecessary complications by tapping into the latest advancements in observability practice.
Buddy Brewer
GVP and GM, New Relic

OBSERVABILITY DELIVERS HOLISTIC VIEW

In 2022, organizations will be able to establish new levels of insights into monitored systems and their business outcomes by consuming observability beyond the traditional data lake approach. Connecting metrics, events and logs across applications, infrastructure and networks to establish accurate, end-to-end correlation will deeply tie digital services to their business impact. This improved holistic view will enable an expanded persona group across IT teams to align outcomes to customer and employee digital experiences. Scalability to handle the increasing complexity of evolving IT infrastructures will enable a single point of management across thousands of business services.
Andreas Reiss
Head of Product Management, AIOps, Broadcom

Observability will become a thread that binds together engineering, customer service, marketing, and business analysis by unlocking detailed insights about the software that powers the modern enterprise. Austin Parker
Principal Developer Advocate , Lightstep

Observability technology will become better and smarter. Application teams want easy and lightweight integrations with observability tools and "quarterback" DevOps teams need ever more holistic visibility and direct control over what is going on, not just data. As a result, observability vendors will provide higher-level data and control planes.
Tobias Kunze
CEO and Co-Founder, Glasnostic

SINGLE PANE OF GLASS

IT will break through the single-pane-of-glass control point to drive innovation, enable new workflows, and empower consumers of observability data. Every aspect of IT — from development to ops to security — is under massive, increasing pressure to build, secure, maintain, triage, and troubleshoot faster than ever before. To accomplish their goals, they need data about their apps and systems, which has given rise to observability strategies and solutions over the past few years. However, these single-pane-of-glass solutions become a chokepoint between data and the people who need it. They limit control, provide watered-down insights in an effort to serve multiple audiences, and often come with unpredictable costs. In 2022, the need to drive innovation, enable more workflows, and empower more observability data consumers will come to a head as teams begin to augment single-pane-of-glass solutions with tools that best serve their needs. This need will fuel demand for observability data pipelines, which make it possible to quickly route the right data to the right people and tools at the right time.
Tucker CallawayCEO, LogDNA

AIOps will grow in 2022 as businesses adapt in order to be successful in delivering the digital experiences customers demand as they move to hybrid cloud environments. Teams are burdened with too many tools, lack of a monitoring strategy, overwhelming event noise, and undetected issues that negatively impact the business. AIOps provides organizations with insights into their data to help them identify pain points, reduce noise, provide visibility to issues before they impact the business, and meet business objectives while saving time and money. This eliminates the need to analyze thousands of events and transforms large amounts of data into actionable information which is key for business success and efficiency. With data volume and complexity increasing, and increasingly dynamic modern architectures, IT Operations can only scale effectively with AIOps in place. This helps address customer needs by being more proactive with improved troubleshooting through a single pane of glass.
Ali Siddiqui
Chief Product Officer, BMC Software

EVOLUTION FROM STATIC TO DYNAMIC OBSERVABILITY

One of the major trends we'll see is an evolution from static to dynamic observability. With traditional observability tools, when you want to have access to a specific metric, trace, or other piece of information about your application, it often requires you to make a new configuration change, code change, or even a redeployment of your application. If you couple this requirement with enterprise release management practices, where environments are more heavily regulated and often require one or more approval gates, this can dramatically slow down the troubleshooting process. The future is dynamic observability which enables teams to gather any data point within their application in real-time and on-demand.
Liran Haimovitch
CTO and Co-Founder, Rookout

MICROSERVICES DRIVE OBSERVABILITY ADOPTION

As microservices adoption grows, more enterprises will need to consider adopting observability platforms that can help development teams identify and resolve root causes of application performance issues.
Rahul Pradhan
Head of Product and Engineering, Cloud Databases, Couchbase

Serverless Demands New Observability Capabilities

At a time where digital experiences are more important than ever, it's difficult to predict the resources necessary to deliver the best customer experience. If your code is idle, so is the meter, and organizations don't have a second to waste as they speed up development to meet increasing customer demands. On the near horizon, I believe all cloud services will be serverless in nature. Serverless is about simplicity for the developer and the customer, eliminating any undifferentiated heavy lifting customers in today's environments face while scaling. A serverless world helps with resource utilization, agility and delivers advanced customer experiences — a major point of interest for any organization. However, the inherent complexity of moving to, and maintaining, a serverless environment is a less-understood challenge. As DevOps teams continually move beyond server infrastructures and container-based applications, traditional monitoring won't show them what's going on in their ecosystems. Advanced observability is imperative for helping organizations operate in serverless environments, and adopters of both will drive unparalleled customer experiences
Spiros Xanthos
VP, Product Management, Observability & IT Operations, Splunk

CODE OBSERVABILITY

Code as the Missing Pillar of Observability. Gone are the days of "move fast and break things." With applications playing an essential role in nearly every aspect of life and business, every product interaction needs to be perfect to ensure retention, drive growth, and maintain a competitive edge. This puts more pressure on development teams who face competing priorities of speed, accuracy and innovation. Observability has to "shift left" to focus on developer-first code monitoring to solve issues in minutes versus investigating for days. What developer teams know is that code — thhe part of applications that is changing most frequently and has the most immediate impact on customer experience — is the aspect of application health that has historically been monitored the least. Yet issues in code, such as errors, slowdowns, crashes and inconsistent responses, all create downtime, ruin product experiences and destroy user trust. Between these user-first paradigms and the proliferation of frontend platforms like mobile, developers need developer-first monitoring more than ever. With our ever-growing reliance on digital experiences in 2022, these platforms will need to not only reduce resolution time within increasingly complex code bases, but they also have to offer organization-level insights to constantly improve their application health. The shift left to code observability will accelerate to meet this growing need.
Milin Desai
CEO, Sentry

CENTRAL OBSERVABILITY TEAM

Central observability team functions will become the norm, not just for tech giants. Over the past few years, a new role has emerged in many of the large cloud-native companies: the central observability team. This team is responsible for defining observability standards and practices, delivering key data to engineering teams and managing the tooling and storage of observability data, among other things. To date, this team has primarily existed in the large cloud-native companies, but in 2022, we expect to see this function proliferate to the enterprise as well as see these companies ramp up their observability practices alongside the move to cloud-native.
Martin MaoCEO and Co-Founder, Chronosphere

OBSERVABILITY HYPE DIES DOWN

In 2022, the hype around observability will die down. Vendors who are "observability-washing" their monitoring solutions will either flesh out their observability offerings or shift their messaging elsewhere. The emphasis for remaining observability players will be on the active role observability plays in helping ops engineers resolve and prevent issues in the IT environment.
Jason Bloomberg
President, Intellyx

OBSERVABILITY DATA GROWTH BECOMES UNSUSTAINABLE

Observability data growth will force companies to re-examine their current approach. An increasingly common complaint in the cloud-native space is that the observability data (volumes of metrics, logs, and traces) is outpacing the growth of the primary production systems and applications. This is because cloud-native environments emit between 10x and 100x more telemetry than non-cloud-native systems. As this trend continues unchecked, organizations are finding that they've reached an unacceptable tipping point. We expect this tipping point to come to fruition in 2022 as accelerating adoption of Kubernetes drives unsustainable growth of observability data. The only way to tame this growth is to adopt data reduction techniques such as aggregation, roll-up, and dropping low criticality data.
Martin Mao
CEO and Co-Founder, Chronosphere

Go to: 2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4, covering OpenTelemetry.