By Rob Newell, VP of Customer Adoption, New Relic
A vast majority of businesses in India are digital-first. Their digital assets—websites, mobile apps or any public-facing application—need to run like clockwork because glitches or downtime can drive customers to competitors who provide better digital experiences.
In fact, the 2023 Observability Forecast from New Relic revealed that the annual median cost of downtime of IT infrastructure in India stands at $US62.79 million. With this much at stake, organisations need to ask themselves if their tech stack is up to the task.
The challenges with complex systems
Building, delivering, and operating software is a strategic priority for businesses in just about every industry, but regardless of the industry, software defines the customer experience at every level, from first impressions to detailed interactions.
Ensuring experiences are always available, online, and performant is essential to success, but the nature of software updates and enhancements means that outages are inevitable. In India, 54% of businesses experienced high-business-impact outages at least once per week, according to the 2023 Observability Forecast.
The challenge in addressing such outages lies in the fact that there’s a complex web of both systems and infrastructure to keep the software running, as well as agents monitoring various parts of the tech stack. When something goes wrong and the software is slow, unresponsive, or completely down, every minute spent diagnosing and troubleshooting is one minute too long.
For 45% of Indian businesses, the cost of downtime for critical business app outages was US$500,000 or more per hour. This shows how challenging it is to deliver great customer experiences around the clock. Addressing downtime requires businesses to know what went wrong, why it happened, and how to resolve it as quickly as possible. A full record of everything that took place – as well as how different systems interact with each other – is required, but this process can be impeded by siloed monitoring tools unable to offer the full visibility and analysis needed to increase uptime, which is where observability comes in.
Observability creates great customer experiences
Maintaining steady uptime, where all digital assets are running smoothly, requires a single view of all telemetry data — that’s the ability to see how customer experiences trace back to applications, how those applications are connected to IT infrastructure, and how that infrastructure is connected to other systems.
It’s impossible to do this manually or even by using multiple tools to perform the necessary analysis because it leads to inefficiencies. In India, 72% of organisations use more than 10 tools to achieve observability, resulting in more IT outages and larger downtime costs.
With a unified observability solution, businesses can connect the dots, making it easier to proactively find what’s going wrong, and understand why and how to fix it. Businesses can monitor every system, source performance data continuously, and track the performance of customer experiences, be it in the browser, mobile device or underlying infrastructure. All-in-one observability helps businesses prevent issues from occurring and supports a swift response.
The solution to the problem of downtime is simple — observability. Not just mere monitoring of IT infrastructure but a contextualised understanding of it. Observability ensures that a business’s IT infrastructure operates seamlessly, providing customers with frictionless digital experiences. This is also why 74% of Indian business leaders agree that the time taken to resolve IT outages improved after adopting observability technology.
Observability is key to maintaining uptime and performance and arms businesses with the ability to collect, correlate, and contextualise data about their software. With observability, businesses waste less time and less money firefighting incidents and most importantly, can depend on the technology that delivers them the best customer experiences.
