In technology environments, incidents are inevitable, but resolution shouldn’t be uncertain. When a service slows or fails, teams need to move fast to recover productivity. But in many organisations, identifying the root cause and who needs to respond takes longer than it should.
Too often, the initial response is finger-pointing. Teams blame one another – compute blames storage, storage blames network, network blames database – no one can rapidly pinpoint the issue. Meanwhile, user experience and productivity take a hit. It’s clear that purely reactive troubleshooting doesn’t work in today’s complex environments. Instead, organisations need a more proactive approach to understanding and managing performance.
Why traditional monitoring isn’t enough
Most enterprises have monitoring tools, but often each part of the stack is monitored in isolation, and when things go wrong, everyone’s looking at a different part of the puzzle. This approach of running isolated monitoring on different platforms creates a number of issues. It doesn’t:
- Show how well something is performing
- Explain why it’s slow or failing
- Account for user experience
When that’s the level of visibility you’re working with, it’s difficult to rapidly identify and resolve the problem before it impacts your staff or customers. This is why observability matters.
What observability really means
At its core, observability is about having visibility across the full application path. It provides insight into how each part of the system is performing and interacting, so when something does go wrong, it’s easier to pinpoint. In a nutshell, observability enables proactive identification and rapid resolution of critical incidents.
Instead of teams arguing about who is at fault, they can immediately identify and get straight to fixing the problem. That shift puts the focus where it should be – resolution. And organisations are paying attention, with 70% increasing their infrastructure, systems and application observability budgets in 2025 (1).
Real-world benefits of observability
The value of observability isn’t theoretical. It shows up in how teams operate, how quickly they can act, and how confidently they can respond and scale. When you can clearly see system interactions across the entire stack in real time, everything from planning to resolution improves.
- Reduced mean time to recovery (MTTR): Gain valuable insight and visibility to identify root causes faster before the impact escalates, improving outcomes
- SLAs that matter: Define and enforce SLAs at the application performance level, not just infrastructure uptime
- Pre-production validation: Detect scaling and architectural issues, using observability in pre-production environments
- Proactive risk detection: Spot performance degradation before it becomes a customer-facing problem
- Experience benchmarking: Compare your performance against baselines or competitors to sharpen your digital strategy
- Predictive analytics: Observability is increasingly predictive, helping teams identify patterns and remediate issues before SLAs are breached or users are impacted
- End-to-end insights: From development to production to the end user, infrastructure, systems and application observability connect the dots and help teams make better decisions at every stage
Where it’s working: Observability in action
Advent One customers are already seeing the impact of observability delivered as a service, with automation, rapid deployment, and expert tuning embedded from day one. Outcomes delivered include:
- 35% latency reduction with 99.95% uptime: A national logistics provider achieved major performance gains and high reliability by integrating full-stack observability with automation and AI
- Pre-production validation: A government agency identified scaling limitations during load testing, enabling them to refine the architecture before
- Retail resilience: During a critical sales period, a major retailer used automated remediation to address a backend slowdown before it escalated into a customer-impacting outage
- Banking performance visibility: A financial services provider discovered that, although traditional monitoring showed the system to be ‘up,’ key transaction flows had slowed dramatically, impacting user experience
These outcomes demonstrate what happens when observability extends beyond tooling and becomes integral to how performance, reliability, and user experience are delivered.
Less firefighting, more foresight
Observability isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s foundational for delivering the digital experiences users expect. When done right, it helps prevent issues, improves operational agility, and raises service standards across the board.
With Advent One, you get real-time insight, automation, and operational maturity, without the overhead of managing it yourself – allowing critical staff to focus on your business. We partner with you to manage the complexity, so you can focus on performance, resilience and outcomes. Talk to us today.
(1) https://www.dynatrace.com/info/ebooks/the-state-of-observability/