In our newest podcast, Scott DeViney, a business development executive at SolarWinds, explained that observability offers agencies a modern approach to updating their IT infrastructures by going beyond traditional monitoring.

Unlike monitoring, which only tells you what is happening, observability provides insights into why an issue occurs, whether it is related to network activity, cloud infrastructure, or application code. For federal government agencies overseeing some of the world’s most intricate networks, this shift is especially valuable. Observability allows agencies to proactively identify issues before they become outages or security breaches by correlating data from across the IT environment.

In the most recent episode of the Government Technology Insider podcast, DeViney and host Lucas Hunsicker explore the challenges civilian agencies face when updating their IT infrastructure and how observability can provide much-needed solutions. Civilian agencies tasked with delivering secure and reliable digital services to the public often struggle with complicated infrastructure and aging legacy systems. The ongoing need to balance security, compliance, and efficiency puts a strain on resources and creates major operational hurdles.

Some of the key challenges discussed included managing thousands of users spread across multiple regions, and the growing complexity of hybrid cloud environments. DeViney pointed out that observability is particularly helpful in handling these complexities because it allows IT teams to transition from reactive to proactive operations by interpreting and correlating vast amounts of data. This improved resource optimization helps to ensure compliance with constantly changing regulations and helps agencies maintain safe and efficient services.

One interesting real-world example DeViney shared was how observability assisted an agency in identifying and resolving a configuration issue that had affected user experience. Although individual IT tools reported no issues, they were able to identify the root cause and promptly restore service quality by comparing performance metrics.