India’s digital revolution over the past decade has paved the way for robust business innovation and customer-centricity. According to a study by McKinsey, which analysed 17 mature and emerging economies, India’s digital acceleration is only second to Indonesia.
This digital advancement has largely been driven by growing smartphone usage and affordable access to the internet. As more consumers enter the digital commerce space every day, the demand for improved speed, convenience and personalisation is expected to grow significantly.
The rise of mobile apps after the pandemic has also enabled easier communication and simplified everyday tasks – whether grocery delivery, ride sharing or telehealth services – so much so that organisations are responding to evolving customer expectations by optimising their cloud environments to gain competitive advantage.
However, challenges around IT, including outages and system interruptions, persist.
Most organisations also do not currently monitor their full tech stacks and even if they do, the process is fragmented. Over the past few years, observability has come to the rescue of many Indian organisations, enabling them to troubleshoot and resolve issues faster, ensure operational efficiency, and produce high-quality software that promotes an optimal customer experience.
Research findings show that organisations in India are budgeting for full stack observability significantly more than any other country across the Asia Pacific region. While this is encouraging, there is still a disconnect between recognising the value of observability, and proper implementation. If this gap is closed, there is enormous opportunity for Indian organisations to set themselves up for observability success.
A unified full stack observability platform can ensure optimal use of all underlying components by controlling costs and increasing profitability, all the while offering the best digital experience to customers. Below are the top three ways observability can enhance a rapidly digitalised landscape in India:
1. Improved business agility
The exponential growth in the uptake of digital services and applications in the past few years in India is stimulating fintech innovation across retail, healthcare, education and financial services. Customers in this digital universe have come to expect personalised experiences customised to their preferences and needs. Consequently, organisations are exploring ways to be more agile by elevating their digital services and applications to be highly intuitive and end-user friendly, while staying ahead of fierce competition. Unlike conventional monitoring, observability empowers organisations to not just know that something is wrong but to also understand why. It gives organisations the flexibility to understand patterns they hadn’t even thought about before, like application throughput, compute capacity and alerts on exceeding a certain error budget.
2. Enable efficient cloud-native architecture roll-outs
In the digital world, sophisticated modern-day applications and infrastructures are continuously evolving. Applications too are being rapidly deployed at massive scale, with the release cycles now reduced to days. While there are massive benefits of this transformation, there are significant challenges that arise in terms of uptime, reliability, performance and security. It is imperative that the IT and engineering teams responsible have end-to-end visibility for continuous contextual monitoring, faster detection of issues and quick decision making. A unified full stack observability platform can ensure optimal use of all underlying software at speed and scale.
3. Build developer confidence and risk mitigation
Today, engineers are keen to leverage observability alongside other tools to accelerate their customers’ most important business initiatives, including cloud adoption, application modernisation, and digital customer experience. Therefore, it’s necessary to provide them with a vast ecosystem of partnerships and integrations to help grow their observability practices alongside the tools and technologies they already know. Observability allows every engineer to do their best work with data by prioritising security risk at every stage of the software development lifecycle.
Organisations in India are certainly seeing the business value of observability since it provides access to the health of their entire system in a single, consolidated view with powerful insights to drive organisational and operational decisions. As the country moves to the next phase of growth and expansion of a digital economy, business and consumer interactions are already being reshaped. Observability will be the next frontier for organisations to navigate and support rapidly expanding business workloads.
By Pradeep Seshadri, Head of Solutions Consulting India at New Relic
This article was first published by Times of India