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Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2023: Applied Observability and Digital Immune System

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Gartner announced the list of 10 top strategic technology trends that organizations need to explore in 2023, and two technologies in particular will be of special interest to APMdigest readers: Applied Observability and Digital Immune System.

Gartner says this year's top strategic technology trends will drive significant disruption and opportunity over the next five to 10 years.

Digital Immune System

76% of teams responsible for digital products are now also responsible for revenue generation. CIOs are looking for new practices and approaches that their teams can adopt to deliver that high business value, along with mitigating risk and increasing customer satisfaction. A digital immune system provides such a roadmap.

In a recent Gartner article, Joachim Herschmann, Senior Director Analyst on the Application Design and Development team at Gartner, explains: "A digital immune system combines a range of practices and technologies from software design, development, automation, operations and analytics to create superior user experience (UX) and reduce system failures that impact business performance. A DIS protects applications and services in order to make them more resilient so that they recover quickly from failures"

Digital immunity combines data-driven insight into operations, automated and extreme testing, automated incident resolution, software engineering within IT operations and security in the application supply chain to increase the resilience and stability of systems.

Herschmann says the prerequisites for a strong digital immune system include:

■ Observability

■ AI-augmented testing

■ Chaos engineering

■ Autoremediation

■ Site reliability engineering (SRE)

■ Software supply chain security

Gartner predicts that by 2025, organizations that invest in building digital immunity will reduce system downtime by up to 80% — and that translates directly into higher revenue.

Applied Observability

Observable data reflects the digitized artifacts, such as logs, traces, API calls, dwell time, downloads and file transfers, that appear when any stakeholder takes any kind of action. Applied observability feeds these observable artifacts back in a highly orchestrated and integrated approach to accelerate organizational decision-making.

"Applied observability enables organizations to exploit their data artifacts for competitive advantage," said Frances Karamouzis, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. "It is powerful because it elevates the strategic importance of the right data at the right time for rapid action based on confirmed stakeholder actions, rather than intentions. When planned strategically and executed successfully, applied observability is the most powerful source of data-driven decision-making."

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2023: Applied Observability and Digital Immune System

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Gartner announced the list of 10 top strategic technology trends that organizations need to explore in 2023, and two technologies in particular will be of special interest to APMdigest readers: Applied Observability and Digital Immune System.

Gartner says this year's top strategic technology trends will drive significant disruption and opportunity over the next five to 10 years.

Digital Immune System

76% of teams responsible for digital products are now also responsible for revenue generation. CIOs are looking for new practices and approaches that their teams can adopt to deliver that high business value, along with mitigating risk and increasing customer satisfaction. A digital immune system provides such a roadmap.

In a recent Gartner article, Joachim Herschmann, Senior Director Analyst on the Application Design and Development team at Gartner, explains: "A digital immune system combines a range of practices and technologies from software design, development, automation, operations and analytics to create superior user experience (UX) and reduce system failures that impact business performance. A DIS protects applications and services in order to make them more resilient so that they recover quickly from failures"

Digital immunity combines data-driven insight into operations, automated and extreme testing, automated incident resolution, software engineering within IT operations and security in the application supply chain to increase the resilience and stability of systems.

Herschmann says the prerequisites for a strong digital immune system include:

■ Observability

■ AI-augmented testing

■ Chaos engineering

■ Autoremediation

■ Site reliability engineering (SRE)

■ Software supply chain security

Gartner predicts that by 2025, organizations that invest in building digital immunity will reduce system downtime by up to 80% — and that translates directly into higher revenue.

Applied Observability

Observable data reflects the digitized artifacts, such as logs, traces, API calls, dwell time, downloads and file transfers, that appear when any stakeholder takes any kind of action. Applied observability feeds these observable artifacts back in a highly orchestrated and integrated approach to accelerate organizational decision-making.

"Applied observability enables organizations to exploit their data artifacts for competitive advantage," said Frances Karamouzis, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. "It is powerful because it elevates the strategic importance of the right data at the right time for rapid action based on confirmed stakeholder actions, rather than intentions. When planned strategically and executed successfully, applied observability is the most powerful source of data-driven decision-making."

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

Hot Topics

The Latest

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...